Call for Artists for Bodhi Khaya's Annual Artist Residency

Calling sculptors, dancers, poets, performance/sound artists, land artists! We invite you to come together in a week-long artist residency at Bodhi Khaya from 27 September to 4 October 2022 to create on and with the land that surrounds.

Georgina Hamilton, custodian of Bodhi Khaya, outlines the conceptual background of the residency:

In her book, “Rock/ Water/ Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa" Lesley Green says "The three gods of reason of the knowledge economy … serve to authorise extractivism, and their names are Technical Efficiency, Economic Profitability, and Scientific Objectivity. Like a game of rock-paper-scissors in which each has the capacity to trump the other, their wielding has the power to close and limit available evidence of harm to the earth, so that no other concerns might be imaginable, or seem viable, or reasonable.

We need a new story here on earth; about earth; for earth; for ourselves. That uncomfortable gap between environmental science and ecopolitics (including social justice) is a good one for artists. What are the questions we don't bother to ask or even know to ask? What are the shapes and connections we forget to see or haven't stopped long enough to see. Where are we in the captured wild?

Bodhi Khaya is among the wilder places in the Overberg yet it has many wounds. In addition to its toll on lives and livelihoods, Colonialism introduced animals and plants that had an effect on the environment like biological weapons. A hundred and fifty years of cattle grazing spread grass seed throughout the delicate Fynbos biome. Fast-growing wattles from Australia were brought in nearly 200 years ago to stabilize dunes and feed a tanning industry. Today they are a significant fire hazard and "dynamic colonisers" of the Cape Floral Region. Their ability to take over much of this extraordinarily bio-diverse region is staggering and the focus of much hand-wringing and ineffiicient mitigation by environmentalists.

At this residency I hope the land will invite us to see both scars and the medicine as we sit on the tamed lawns and enter the wild woods, or keep warm by a fire of wattle. What is inside and what is outside?

'We think we imagine the land, but perhaps the land imagines us, and in its imaginings it shapes us. The exterior landscape interacts with our interior landscape, and in the resulting entanglements, we become something more than we otherwise could ever hope to be.’

- Sharon Blackie, "The Enchanted Life"

We invite land/nature artists, sculptors, installation artists, performance/movement artists, spoken-word/poetry/sound artists to work with/in/on the land of Bodhi Khaya and its spiritual and political history. Landscape painters will not be accepted as we focus on working directly with and on the land.

We particularly encourage artists to explore ‘place’ as a concept which incorporates the environment and the people who engage with it. We believe that artworks created at our residencies not only imply a respect for place, but also a desire to reveal and comment upon our relationship with it, rather than exploiting it for the sake of art.

We will live and work on Bodhi Khaya for a week, getting to know and learn from each other, perhaps even collaborate with each other, create ephemeral or permanent artworks of all kinds and we’ll have fun!

If you are an artists interested in applying, find the website and application form here: https://artistinresidence.co.za

Some images of last year’s creations