The Northern Cape Phytosphere, Artisanal Mining, and Multispecies Remediation in Eureka
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Helene Strauss will speak on
The Northern Cape Phytosphere, Artisanal Mining, and Multispecies Remediation in Eureka
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The story of South Africa’s mineral revolutions has from the outset been one of unchosen atmospheric intimacies, and of the destruction of mutually revitalising ways of breathing together across racial and species divides. Histories of “atmospheric violence” (Hsuan Hsu) are at the center also of Eureka (2022), a transdisciplinary collaboration between Northern Cape artist and public health physician André Rose, and Free State artist and academic Janine Allen. The installation brings together a set of photographs and artworks aimed at mediating the sites of abandonment left in the wake of South Africa’s historic diamond rush, where artisanal miners have recently been reworking the tailings of previously mined areas at great risk to their own health and safety. Colloquially called the second diamond rush, this increase in small-scale and artisanal mining operations has exacerbated the effects of drought on the Northern Cape’s soil, vegetation and air, in turn worsened by an accelerating climate crisis.
The paper considers some of the novel ways in which Eureka shows agentic relations between human and non-human actors to converge within the Northern Cape phytosphere, a term I expand to include the atmospheric terrain where plant chemistry and other “ecologies of the particular” (Jean-Thomas Tremblay) intersect. Taking my cue from Allen’s painting “Hole, with Tumbleweed,” I focus my analysis in part on the hole and the tumbleweed—two key symbols that feature prominently in global iconographies of extraction and abandonment, frontier capitalism and industrial mining — to demonstrate how Eureka draws the materialities of sunlight, soil, vegetation, and dust into atmospheric relation. To develop my argument about these figurative and material entanglements, I consider the installation’s exploration of artisanal mining and multispecies remediation in relation to longer histories of mineral extraction, energy production, and environmental degradation central to the region.
Helene Strauss is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. Her publications include the book Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press); co-edited special issues of the journals Interventions, Critical Arts, and Studies in Social Justice; and a co-edited book titled Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge). She is the recipient of numerous academic awards and fellowships, including a Canadian Governor General’s Gold Medal, a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Publication Grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and upcoming fellowships from STIAS and the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her current book project, titled Phytospheric Justice, follows the symbiotic atmospheric pathways that connect plant and human breath. The project considers how creative cultural workers in contexts with overlapping histories of colonisation, devegetation and extractive violence imagine post-smog futures and advance the flourishing of multi-species breath.
Monday, 24th March 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
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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