The horizontal “drift” of the 6-or-so km walk from the Riebeek West station to the gate of Langvlei Farm, my home, will not be presented as a depiction of a landscape painting or drawing. I hope to share the physical evidence of a collision between a human, a plant, and a railroad. In contemporary art—especially within the context of thinking to present the work for a local art competition—that trace is often considered much more profound than a literal rendering, because it contains the truth of the encounter. It’s about the roll of the tolbos and the rhythm of the rail. By walking this former train route, I will collect detritus and record marks as well as sounds emitted from the walking and non-human along the rail. This material will form the basis for drawings and soundscapes envisaged as a sensory cartography of the rail lines’ current

The scroll length is 10.068 meters or 106.68 centimetres, which refers to the length of a train rail; the total distance of the walk is 6 km. This would imply that I have walked a line with at least 120 rail lines linked together (two rows). The scroll is 35cm wide. The idea is that the scroll becomes an index of the infrastructure I walked. I open and end the work with a tumbleweed as my narrator. It seems it outlasted the trains and led me from the farm to the station and the history behind the rail. It goes from green to dry across the scroll, marking time. My scroll unfolds by unrolling, just like the tumbleweed rolling down the track; the start and end are the same plant, but displaced.

In the setup of this artwork, I want it (the scroll) to act as a continuous timeline:

  • The Hanging Section: One end of the scroll is hung from the wall using a standard top dowel and cord.
  • The Loops: Instead of hanging straight down to a bottom rod, the paper curves gracefully toward the viewer.
  • The Pedestal Base: The remainder of the work rests on a low pedestal (about 40–60 cm high), with the unrolled portion lying flat and the “extra” length remaining coiled around a heavy roller rod at the far end.

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