More WHY walking thoughts
I used a scroll that interrogates the landscape through the act of walking. The scroll functions as a temporal map, echoing the “cinematic” and sequential nature of movement through space. I allow the terrain to dictate the mark. Through indexical processes—including frottage (rubbing), blind embossment, and the suspension of local soil pigments—the paper becomes a membrane.
Since I started my repetitive walk along the rail line, I also had encounters with people living near the line, due to the 1965 forced removals of people classified by race to live in separate areas from white people. As well as poor families living in the old derelict station buildings and houses around the rail line. I presume these are all part of the infrastructure of the Riebeek West station. I am aware of the lack of basic services, as these families occupy the buildings without paying rent or for any municipal services.
In thinking about care, I am aware of its limits: how easily it slips into the paternalism of rescue or the presumption of speaking for others. The forced removals of affected families in this community are not mine to tell, and the people who lived it have kept its memory far longer than I have walked here. The younger generation tells me their parents and grandparents never told them much. I work with restraint, as a way of practising care as correspondence: moving alongside a history rather than claiming it. When I push a tumbleweed along a disused rail, I let it leave marks; I do not dictate, and hope to later seal anonymous notes from the community inside its branches. Two local poets speak in their own language in the accompanying video; I shape the frame and remain accountable for it. Restraint is not the whole of care, however. A walk cannot undo history, and stepping back must not become stepping away. What matters most comes after the walk, in conversation and relationship.
REFLECTING ON PREPARING FOR A ‘PERFORMANCE’
A few days ago I walked the line with a camera on my head and a phone in my hand, pushing the tumbleweed. My plan was practical: time the walk, and measure how far I would get in the time I set out to perform the work. Doing this, I could compare it with earlier walks and have a better idea of distance for the upcoming event.
Somewhere along the rail, the walk began to turn into a spectacle, and I was watching myself in the shadows next to the rail. Cars and farm tractors past and I thought of this sight as a spectacle, but soon what what in front of me asked me to look, listen, hear and reach out to touch.
Watching the footage back, I saw what had actually held my attention. First, the care of my hands: how I rolled the tolbos, how it caught and let go. Then, without my deciding, my attention drifted outward to birds, ducks, a green bug on a plant, a golden dragonfly I followed for a while. Looking at the footage, I remembered the many other walks along the line. None of this is on the screen. A viewer will see someone pushing a tumbleweed along a rail. The dragonfly and birdsong are mine.
The tolbos can’t move without a push, and it gathers only what the path gives it. I am learning that I can’t control that, and I don’t want to. Tumbleweeds can be seen as icons of resillience, the species seemlingly survives in the harsh environment on the rail line – this has been neglected and human-altered and seemingly resists human control in a effortless way. They can also be seen as agents of migration – living symbols of non-native displacement, wind dispersal and symbols of borders (bordercrossing) between the rail corridor and the farms. I have collected most of my ‘species’ along the fences or dirt roads along farms.
Walking as a collective act
I have timed and measured the walk but think I will still use a timer to indicate the end of the walk. What I can’t rehearse is howe the tolbos will behave on the walk, the weather or who may or may not choose to share the space with me.
During the walk, I do not talk or give directions. I like it to be intuitive, a way of seeing what can happen when a space is shared. I believe my walking practice for this project has always been playful: letting things happen, then becoming aware of what happened in between. Perhaps that is as far as I can take an idea of collective walking. I won’t lead, only leave a space open and notice.
Tolbos on a Line (a Walk the Line intervention), Blacksmith Yard, Gallery, Riebeek West.
The spectacle I felt is unavoidable on the day. People will watch me. I have built in a way through it: when I reach the sign with the extra tumbleweeds, I will pause in silence. The watched person becomes a walker among walkers. That connects directly to what I felt with the camera on.
Silence as the method. No instructions or explanations imply each person decides for themselves whether to step in. (I could write about what it means to offer a shared space without telling people how to use it. That is close to Ono’s instruction pieces, in which the person receiving the instruction does the work.)
The hand-washing at the end. It is another wordless invitation, and it moves the piece from walking together to doing something together. One sentence on that would be enough.
Playfulness. In many ways my practice has always been playful, letting things happen and noticing what happened in between. The three boys with their wire cars were the beginning of this project, so you could say that play is how the work started.
I am bearing witness to what I see around the station, where people have moved into abandoned and empty ‘government’ structures, as these belonged to the SAR company, or Transnet as it is currently known. I am bearing witness to the conditions, regardless of how or why these people have arrived at the old station. The reality remains. I observe that this corridor als act as a landing pad for those at the margins. I choose not to stand above or before them, I move alongside them. I work to show restrain by refusing to overstep the boundary that protect the dignity of the community.
My performance/walking intervention will to it by
- The Blind Drawing: When I let the tolbos drag across pigment on paper, I relinquish control over the mark-making. I am not forcing the tumbleweed to spell out a literal narrative; I want to let the physical friction of the plant, paper, iron, and stone correspond with each other.
- The Sealed Tumbleweed: When visitors place anonymous notes inside the tolbos, I will not open or read them. I plan to curate an unopened vessel. This is care exercised through privacy and protection—allowing grief, hope, or memory to exist without turning it into a public spectacle for gallery consumption.
- Amplifying Existing Voices: Instead of writing a theatrical narrative about Oukloof, I stepped back and create a platform for local poets Donker Jonker and Nicolene Smit to speak in their own Afrikaans mother tongue. I believe I carry the frame; they carry the voice.
There are Limits of Care in the Physical Landscape
Asking whether care has limits is especially vital when one walks past the old station and encounters the unhoused community living in present-day neglect.
- Acknowledging the Limit: As an individual artist walking for 19 minutes and 65 seconds, my care cannot instantly build housing, restore municipal water, or undo decades of spatial violence. Confessing that “we cannot fix the infrastructure with a walk” is an honest admission of those limits.
- Bodily Attention as the Threshold: Where care reaches its practical limits, Ingolds correspondence becomes “bodily attention.” My physical presence along the neglected line refuses the comfort of looking away. It marks a baseline of human acknowledgement.
Framing This in my conceptual writing
I want to weave Ingold’s ideas or this reflection on restraint into my notes or artist statement.
“In thinking through care, I am conscious of its limits—how easily care can slip into the paternalism of rescue or the presumption of speaking for others. Working with restraint is my way of practicing care as correspondence: moving alongside a history rather than claiming ownership of it.
To push a tumbleweed along an abandoned rail, to gather raw marks without dictating the line, and to leave the notes sealed inside the branches are acts of listening. Restraint allows the work to remain an act of witness, holding space for community truths without attempting to colonize them.”
Some reading I have been contemplating concerning my project:
Michael Rothberg argues that memory is multidirectional: histories do not compete for a limited space but interact, and remembrance is a dialogue across different times and places, shaped by where the rememberer stands. Walking the corridor, I find this less an idea than a bodily fact. The line is a colonial infrastructure and a path walked today; the scroll’s marks fall out of walk order; the removals sit beside the neglect of the station and the pressure on the renosterveld. Yet resonance is not equivalence. I walk the line freely, as a white artist, while for others walking is a necessity.
Rothberg says memory is multidirectional: it is shaped by where and when you remember from, and it connects histories rather than ranking them. The multidirectional walk must therefore connect without flattening, and leave the telling of the removals to those who lived them.
Hirsch looks at
Taken together, the two writers pull in a useful tension. Rothberg says memory is multidirectional: it is shaped by where and when you remember from, and it connects histories rather than ranking them. Hirsch warns that those who come after must signal their distance and not appropriate what they didn’t suffer. You are implicated but not descended, so you sit between the two. Rothberg tells you that your location is part of the memory work, and Hirsch tells you what to do with that location: stay honest about the distance
I also came upon an artist who planted weeds along a rail line – Ois Weinberger (1947 – 2020, Austria). He called himself an ‘agricultural worker’ and is known for using nature as his medium, implying that he speaks through it, but also let nature speak for itself. His interventions aimed to uncover realities that were phased out of the utilitarian infrastructure and thinking of modern society.
Weeds are a recurrent tool in hia oeuvre. In many of his works, the seemingly useless but rebellious plants, which tend to pop up in the most unexpected and unwanted places, are given free reign – in neatly demarcated zones that is. His famous ‘Wild Cubes’ for instance, have been installed in small and large formats all over the world. The steel cube in which weeds are left to do their own thing and human interference is prohibited are a reference to all species – fauna, flora and human – which were driven to the edge of society, both literally and figuratively, for being unpredictable and thus uncontrollable. Whether it be a small sculpture made from twigs, plastic bags filled with concrete or a large ‘Heap of rotting plants’ (Austrian Pavilion, Venice Biennial, 2009), Weinberger continually aims to expose both the presumed irreconcilability and the actual interwovenness of the artificiality and functionalism of culture and the chaotic life forces of nature and (human) freedom.
Weinberger started making his first works in the 70s and hasn’t changed course since. Although his works could be seen as being highly influenced by the mindset of that era, they’re equally, if not more, relevant today.
Comprehensive Artist Statement (Ideal for catalogue, exhibition wall, or portfolio)
My practice is rooted in walking as a form of sustained attention to a single landscape—specifically, one stretch of railway line carrying its own layered history. Through repeated movement across this terrain, my work explores the tension between displacement and endurance, centering on the land that remains and the history embedded within it. I walk by choice. For many people here, walking is how everything gets done.
Walk the Line navigates the space where personal reflection, environmental processes, and cultural memory intersect. It touches on the legacy of the Group Areas Act, the natural rewilding of the veld, and the lives of the people currently living at the station. The work examines displacement within a place—how history leaves physical and social traces on a landscape that stays.
This process relies on humble materials and accumulated labour. Using charcoal and pigments made from local bushes, shale, ash, gum arabic, Xuan paper, and the tolbos itself, the artwork builds over time. The scroll, rubbings, and drawings mirror the slow, unglamorous effort of the physical walk—a length of rail recorded through repetition and material traces.
Through the action of moving the tolbos along the rail and holding sealed community notes, the work becomes a vessel for quiet reflection. It invites a shared reckoning with local memory, opening a subtle path toward resilience, healing, and hope.
OR
I walk one stretch of decommissioned railway line again and again, as a way of paying sustained attention to a single place. I walk by choice. For many people here, walking is how everything gets done. The line carries a layered history: the legacy of the Group Areas Act, the veld slowly returning over the rails, and the people who live at the old station today. I am interested in displacement and endurance within one place, and in how a landscape that stays holds the traces of what has happened to it.
The work is made slowly, from what the place offers: charcoal burnt from local bushes, ash, shale, gum arabic, Xuan paper, and the tolbos that rolls along the line, gathering what the path gives it. A scroll the length of a rail is built from rubbings over many walks, and the drawings and the performance follow the same unglamorous rhythm. I don’t resolve or speak for any of this. I walk, I record, I witness, and I hope the work leaves room for others to add their own traces, including the notes they may seal inside the tumbleweed.
Short Artist Statement (Ideal for gallery handouts or web entry)
Rooted in a single stretch of railway line, my walking practice acts as a slow, deliberate engagement with place. Walk the Line explores displacement within a landscape—navigating the physical terrain alongside the memory of the Group Areas Act, the returning veld, and the community living at the station.
The work is built through accumulated, unglamorous labour and humble materials tied directly to the ground: charcoal from local bushes, shale, ash, Xuan paper, and the tolbos. Through repeated walks, rubbings, and the holding of sealed community notes, the project transforms a fixed line into a space for collective memory, resilience, and quiet healing.
Option 3: First-Person Voice (Ideal for artist talks, Instagram captions, or personal reflection)
My walking practice is rooted in the essence and history of a single stretch of rail. Through Walk the Line, I move between my own physical steps, the historical weight of the Group Areas Act, the natural return of the veld, and the daily lives of the people who reside at the station.
My focus is not on migration across borders, but on displacement within a place—the land that stays and the complex histories it carries.
I work through accumulated labour and simple, grounded materials: charcoal harvested from local bushes, shale, ash, gum arabic, Xuan paper, and the tolbos. The scrolls, rubbings, and performance mirror this slow, repetitive effort. By carrying sealed notes written by the community, the work holds space for local voices, offering a quiet gesture toward resilience, hope, and healing.