INVITE | Plant Lives - Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho on Return and Recovery in the land practices of Bakoni, a soundscape

Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South

Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho will speak on
Return and Recovery in the land practices of Bakoni, a soundscape

Click here for notes and audio

Mafolofolo: a place of recovery (2022) is a sound installation that emerges from five years of our research in Bokoni, Mpumalanga. Our research has sought to understand the multiple cycles of loss and subsequent cycles of return related to the land. We are concerned with the deep and enduring relationships with the land that remain, despite the longue durée of South Africa’s history of land dispossession and displacement. What we take from the particular history of this place is the potential to seek intimacy, ‘spiritual security’, and interdependence with the land and more-than-human life. Mafolofolo is a narrative that traces a history of violence, racism, extraction, and ongoing dispossession with very real contemporary urgencies. It is also an encounter with how we might repair ourselves and the lands from which we find sustenance. For this presentation we share our ongoing negotiation with the study of land and the shaping of land/scapes.

MADEYOULOOK is a Johannesburg-based interdisciplinary artist collaborative between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho. The works of MADEYOULOOK take as their point of departure everyday black practices that have either been historically overlooked or deemed inconsequential. These works encourage a re-observation of and de-familiarisation with the everyday of black South African life. In reworking and interrupting how we view ordinary black lived experiences and the everyday, we are 'made to re-look' and question societal relations. Currently, the works of MADEYOULOOK explore the socialities of land, black traditions of land-based social repair and relationships with plant life. MADEYOULOOK represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale 2024. They were lumbung artists at documenta fifteen and 2022 Fellows of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. They were nominated for the Vera List Centre Prize for Art and Politics at the New School, NY in 2017 and the MTN New Contemporaries prize in 2012.

Monday, 3^rd March 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
Click here to register

Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.

In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them?  Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves?  Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives?  And if so, with what consequences?

This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable.  We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage. 

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.

*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term