Entangled Intimacies: An Experimental Curatorial Project 

of Transdisciplinary Becoming-With 

 

 

By Rory Lee Stewart Thomas 

Student number: 2594678 

 

Supervisor: Sinethemba Twalo 

 

2023 

 

 

A research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the 

degree of Master of Arts in Contemporary Curatorial Practice in the History of 

Art department, Wits School of Arts, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of 

the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 



 2 

 

 

 

Plagiarism Declaration 

 

1. I know that plagiarism means taking and using the ideas, writings, works or inventions of 

another as if they were one’s own. I know that plagiarism not only includes verbatim 

copying, but also the extensive use of another person’s ideas without proper 

acknowledgement (which includes the proper use of quotation marks). I know that 

plagiarism covers this sort of use of material found in textual sources and from the Internet.  

2. I acknowledge and understand that plagiarism is wrong.  

3. I understand that my research must be accurately referenced. I have followed the rules 

and conventions concerning referencing, citation and the use of quotations as set out in 

the departmental referencing guide.  

4. This assignment is my own work, or my group’s own unique group assignment. I 

acknowledge that copying someone else’s assignment, or part of it, is wrong, and that 

submitting identical work to others constitutes a form of plagiarism.  

5. I have not allowed, nor will I in the future allow, anyone to copy my work with the intention 

of passing it off as their own work.  

 

Name:      Rory Lee Stewart Thomas                Student Number:  2594678    

Signed:          Date:  22 August 2023    

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 3 

Acknowledgements 

 

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to a number of individuals and organisations without whom this 

research report, and the practical project it is centred around, would not exist.  

 

Firstly, thank you to my supervisor Sinethemba Twalo. Their support throughout the entirety of the writing of 

this research report and the execution of its practical component has been incredibly helpful and meaningful 

to me. Not only have they given me extensive guidance throughout the process of realising this project, but 

their Curating Exhibitions course fundamentally changed the way I think about curatorial practice and, in 

many ways, created the essentially experimental philosophical grounding needed for this project to be 

conceptualised and realised. The critical insight and knowledge I gained during that course, as well as 

Sinethemba’s committed and nuanced supervision, has been truly invaluable.  

 

Alongside Sinethemba, also at the Wits School of Arts History of Art department, I would like to thank 

Nontobeko Ntombela for graciously putting me forward for the Young Curators Incubator programme. The 

practical experience I have gained (and continue to gain) through this process has been truly incredible. I will 

be forever grateful for this invaluable opportunity to explore, learn, and grow at this pivotal moment in my 

professional journey.  

 

With reference to the Young Curators Incubator further, I would also like to say thank you to the Goethe-

Insitut Johannesburg for generously funding and holding space for this project. I am particularly grateful to 

Samantha Modisenyane, Cara Snyman, and Dr Asma Diakité at the Institut. Their consistent support in the 

ongoing processes of conceptualising, producing, and maintaining the Entangled Intimacies: art, more-than-

human embodiment, and the climate catastrophe exhibition, public programme, and publication has been 

extremely helpful.  

 

I would also of course like to say a huge thank you to the artists who were/are part of the exhibition: Tzung-

Hui Lauren Lee, Io Makandal, and Natalie Paneng. Working with them all has taught me so much more than 

I could have ever imagined about the value, necessity, and potential beauty inherent to contemporary 

curatorial practice. I am so grateful to them for sharing their incredible work with myself and the wider public 

through the Goethe space. 

 

Thank you also to Amy Watson for kindly agreeing to the interview which structures much of this thesis’ third 

chapter. Her curatorial work has been a huge inspiration to me in the conception of this project and it was a 

true privilege to gain more insight into it through this process.  

 

Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends, and partner for their unwavering support, love, and belief in 

me throughout this process. This work is particularly dedicated to my late father who created a space for us 

both to thrive out of what felt like nothing. I would most definitely not be here writing these words if it wasn’t 

for his infinite faith in me.   



 4 

Abstract 

 

Employing strategic modes of textual and curatorial “opacity” (Glissant 1997: 189), this project 

endeavours to consider how arts-based research methodologies may be uniquely positioned 

to explore the chaotic embodied implications of the so-called Anthropocene. This work of arts-

based knowledge production and explorative enquiry is centred around an exhibition I have 

curated entitled Entangled Intimacies: art, more-than-human embodiment, and the climate 

catastrophe, which constitutes this project’s practical component. The exhibition is being held 

from 10 February to 6 May 2023 at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg gallery and features 

newly commissioned artworks by local practitioners Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee, Io Makandal, and 

Natalie Paneng.   

 

This research report considers the ongoing process of curating this exhibition via a varied 

textual pathway that follows through a number of different considerations and references. 

These include an assessment of individual and collective grief, the potential of utilising 

curatorial opacity as a means of relating to the chaos of ecological degradation, and a 

discussion of a selection of previous curatorial projects from the last two decades which have 

engaged this reality through contemporary art. These projects include DON’T/PANIC (2011), 

Sex Ecologies (2021-2022), and the ongoing work of Johannesburg based not-for-profit arts 

organisation POOL (founded in 2015).  

 

The diverse, and at times perhaps disorientating, form of this research report is a curatorial 

and written reflection on the chaotic implications of more-than-human embodiment in the 

Anthropocene. This is conceived as an actualisation of curator Stefanie Hessler’s (2020: 249) 

assertion that “[t]he uneven, uncontainable climate crisis obligates curators to rethink ways of 

working. Exhibition making in times of ecological disaster … needs to differ from previous 

curatorial modes.”  

 

This project works to remain aware of the city of Johannesburg as its site of emergence while 

also engaging with the globally interconnected reality of the Anthropocene. It thus offers a 

propositional, mutable, and exploratory gesture towards what contemporary curatorial practice 

within this uncertain time and place marked by ecological violence may entail.  

 

Keywords:  

Curatorial Studies / Contemporary Art / Curatorial Practice / Ecology / Anthropocene / 

Ecological Degradation / Opacity / Becoming-With / Uncertainty / Death / Loss / 

Interconnection / Transdisciplinary / Entanglement / Embodiment  



 5 

Contents 

 

Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 6 

Chapter 1: Some Notes on Death, Opacity, and Terminology ......................................... 11 

1.1. The artful potentiality of a deathly opacity ................................................................ 12 

1.2. A note on aims and situatedness ............................................................................. 14 

1.3. Curatorial opacity in response to climate chaos ...................................................... 16 

1.4. A note on terminology: ‘Anthropocene’ etcetera ...................................................... 18 

Chapter 2: On Grief as a Prelude to Curatorial Becoming-With ...................................... 22 

2.1. Something akin to hope ............................................................................................ 23 

2.2. Tenacious snails: the slipperiness of death, decay, and more-than-human 

embodiment ..................................................................................................................... 25 

2.3. Relinquishing mastery .............................................................................................. 28 

Chapter 3: Curating Climate Chaos ..................................................................................... 32 

3.1. On the im/possibility of environmental overemphasis .............................................. 35 

3.2. Sex Ecologies and the fecundity of collaborative commission-based curatorial 

practice in response to the Anthropocene ....................................................................... 41 

3.3. POOL and the explorative potential of transdisciplinary, ecologically minded 

curation in Johannesburg ................................................................................................ 45 

Chapter 4: Collectively Materialising Entangled Intimacies ............................................. 50 

4.1. Engaging the more-than-human through fluid artistic coproduction ........................ 52 

4.2. The exhibition as past, present, and future process ................................................ 62 

4.3. The watermelon problem: on the work responding to the space responding to the 

work .................................................................................................................................. 64 

Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 69 

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 71 

List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ 77 

Appendices ............................................................................................................................. 80 

  



 6 

Introduction 

 

Amongst all other beings in this landscape of destructive human impact, we embody and live 

the implications of anthropogenic ecological destruction. In a global culture saturated by 

political, social, and ecological instability, we must thus ask ourselves what it might mean to 

forge collaborative relationships with those that are perceived as materially, emotionally, or 

psychically ‘other’ – human or otherwise. Our context of indistinguishable entanglement, 

climate chaos, and ecological grief necessitates that we become intimately attuned to this 

disastrous moment in ways that are appropriately inconclusive and dynamic. It is imperative, 

therefore, to centre how we, as interspecies planetary kin, collectively embody this destructive 

moment and how we can find ways of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of ecological 

degradation.  

 

It is from this starting point that this curatorial research report and its accompanying practical 

component propose a creative framework that rejects (or, at the very least, resists) the rigid 

capitalist disciplinary logics accelerating the global anthropogenic climate catastrophe. This 

work is actualised via a necessarily explorative and open-ended curatorial research 

endeavour that sees itself as an ongoing, inquisitive process of arts-based knowledge 

production and collective becoming. This is centred around a process-based, contemporary 

art exhibition I have curated entitled Entangled Intimacies: art, more-than-human embodiment, 

and the climate catastrophe. The show features newly commissioned artworks by 

Johannesburg based artists Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee, Io Makandal, and Natalie Paneng, whose 

engagingly fecund creative practices have greatly inspired the Entangled Intimacies project 

and to whom it is heavily indebted. This project is being executed in collaboration with the 

Goethe-Institut South Africa and Wits School of Arts History of Art department’s Young 

Curators Incubator programme. The exhibition portion of the work is (as of submission of this 

document) currently being held at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg’s exhibition space from 

10 February to 6 May 2023.  

 

The works in the exhibition were conceived collaboratively in relation to the curatorial concept 

and are open to change and evolution over its three-month timeline. They are posed as nodes 

within a transdisciplinary, arts-based research environment orientated towards the 

unanswerable and expansive questions posed to us by climate chaos. The framework for this 

project’s unfolding follows Kathrin Busch’s (2009: n.p.) assertion that “artistic forms of 

knowledge do not restrict themselves to applications of theory, but rather begin to develop into 

hybrid formations of knowledge.” Entangled Intimacies engages and actualises these forms of 

hybridised arts-based research and knowledge production through both the indeterminate 



 7 

outcomes of its processual, exhibitionary practical manifestation and the meandering nature 

of this written research report component. The explorative and experiential nature of the two 

co-constitutive elements which comprise this curatorial research endeavour were conceived 

in partial response to, and in conversation with, the previous two iterations of the Young 

Curators Incubator.1 Both of these consisted of relatively static, predominantly photographic 

exhibitions that were also installed at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg space and, as such, 

partially set the stage for my project’s processual unfolding.  

 

The audacious inconclusiveness of the Entangled Intimacies project’s articulations is inspired 

by artistic research’s “fundamental openness to anything that oversteps the framework and 

conditions of the previously possible, in other words, [its] openness to experience the 

unknown, or the impossible” (ibid.). Working in this malleable and explorative way is 

particularly pertinent when considering the pervasive and destructive nature of the so-called 

Anthropocene.2 Within the curatorial realm and beyond, this anarchic and violent environment 

of ecological catastrophe necessitates experimental, strange, and unspecified research 

methodologies to account for its chaotic characteristics. Indeed, curator and writer Stefanie 

Hessler (2020: 249) asserts that…  

[t]he uneven, uncontainable climate crisis obligates curators to rethink ways of 

working. Exhibition making in times of ecological disaster, and grappling with 

the effects of ongoing colonial capitalism palpable on a planetary scale, needs 

 
1 The first of the two previous exhibitions produced as part of the Young Curators Incubator was called Umnyakazo 
(2022). This show comprised of a reframing and expansion of 2 series of photographs by Johannesburg based 
artist Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, entitled Slaghuis and Slaghuis II (2018 - 2019). These photographic works were 
exhibited along with poetic textual interventions and linework that had been etched into the grey walls of the 
Goethe-Institut Johannesburg’s gallery space, and a moving image intervention staged in the closed-off room to 
the left of the space. This first iteration of the Young Curators Incubator was curated by Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose 
and ran from 9 April to 2 July 2022.  

The second exhibition produced as part of the Young Curators Incubator 2022 programme was entitled 
Practices of Self-Fashioning – it was curated by Nkgopoleng Moloi and ran officially from 28 July to 21 October 
2022 (though, in fact, it ran until the end of January 2023). This show was centred around a restaging of archival 
photographs from the GALA Queer Archive’s Kewpie Collection; a personal archive of pictures once owned by a 
renowned District Six, Cape Town-based hairdresser and queer performer of the same name. The exhibition 
intended “to explore the relationship that queer-identifying people have with space and movement within the urban 
landscape” (Moloi 2022: n.p.). The opening of the show was activated by a performative intervention by artist 
Tandile Mbatsha but, aside from that, the exhibition consisted exclusively of 2D photographic works affixed to the 
walls and occasional newspaper clippings. Neither Umnyakazo nor Practices of Self-Fashioning featured any 
activations (in the form of events or evolutions in the works present, for example) throughout the times they were 
respectively up.  
 
2 ‘Anthropocene’ is an incredibly contested word with its roots in geological analysis that has been generally 
adopted within wider academia to discuss the conditions of our complicated ecological reality. It is used as a blanket 
term to refer to the current ecological epoch in which human activity is having an irrevocable impact upon the 
natural world. This term (despite being used to an increasing degree across various fields) cannot truly encompass 
the complexity of that which it attempts to describe. As such, many scholars across various fields have suggested 
alternatives, though ‘Anthropocene’ still seems to remain the most popular – gaining increasing traction in global 
discourse and parlance. I will critically engage with the usefulness of this term further on in this text but, for now, it 
is used in order to bring an, albeit insufficient, name to the social and environmental conditions which have 
precipitated this study. 



 8 

to differ from previous curatorial modes. Curatorial practice is increasingly 

assessed not only by its ability to create a convincing argument, support artists, 

or revisit art history, but also by the way it addresses and responds to the 

structures in which it is embedded.  

This research thus addresses how contemporary curatorial practice is a uniquely fecund 

means of relating to the climate catastrophe from outside of the disciplinary strictures which 

perpetuate it, with particular consideration of its situatedness within the socioecological 

conditions of Johannesburg, South Africa.  

 

The Entangled Intimacies research project (within both this research report and its inexorable 

practical element) melds curatorial research, artistic praxis, creative writing techniques, and 

engagements with climate change-related discourse. In bringing together these various 

elements, this work tentatively forges differentiated pathways away from the more typically 

didactic, simplistic, or easily consumable curatorial methodologies which are ultimately 

ineffectual at engaging the chaotic conditions of the Anthropocene. The overlapping literary 

and physical spaces of this curatorial research thus together “provide a cognitive situation 

where to grasp these questions [concerning the Anthropocene], instead of translating them 

using ordinary criteria in order to produce an ‘opinion’ on the matter, can make all these 

epistemic relations turn, can set them in motion again” (Martínez 2012: 51). The written and 

practical works both, in their own ways, encourage the reader or viewer to consider their ever-

changing emotive and somatic relationships to the works and their concepts, rather than 

simply considering them on intellectual levels. This, in turn, encourages reflection on the 

overarching themes of the project – those related to the entanglements of more-than-human 

embodiment within anthropogenic climate disaster. These are themes which ultimately work 

to dislodge “the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to exempt ourselves from Earth's 

ecological community” (Wright 2014: 278). 

 

Structure 

In line with the project’s explorative inspiration, the form of this written work itself unfolds in an 

equally processual, meandering, and not necessarily directional line through sedimentary 

layers of thought, theory, and practice. I have chosen this way of writing and working because, 

for me, it is the most effective means of engaging the multitudinous influences which have 

contributed to the project’s formation within my own conceptual framework. Additionally to this, 

it is also the most appropriately chaotic means of addressing this disastrous ecological 

moment that the project aims to think with. As such, this research report comprises more a 

thought experiment (informed, as it is, by various overlapping themes and disciplines) than it 

does any kind of instructive or didactic how-to guide on curating in the Anthropocene.  



 9 

 

Given the diverse, sprawling nature of both this curatorial project’s theoretical inspiration and 

its practical manifestation, to write a simplified pedagogical report would be a disservice to its 

aims. This work is intended to be inherently resistive to simplistic explanation and must thus 

be told in an appropriately explorative manner within this research report. The structural, 

linguistic, and material framework of this project thus extends curator and theorist Simon 

Sheikh’s (2017: n.p.) assertion that “[i]deas must … not only be enacted, but embodied, which 

always accepts a lessening of curatorial authorship or authority.” In this way, it is my hope that 

– by weaving an embodied web of relational texts and interdisciplinary practices – the concept 

of the work will take form for the reader or viewer individually, not only via my own subjective 

curatorial lens. 

 

Having said this, however, the research report does follow a loose structure onwards from this 

section into its first chapter, which constitutes an extended introductory articulation that further 

lays the conceptual and curatorial grounding for the project’s unfolding. This first chapter 

introduces the central themes for the work, with a particular emphasis on Édouard Glissant’s 

(1990: 189) notion of “opacity” and how it influences the conceptual framing of the project. The 

first chapter also introduces death and grief as pivotal concepts within the work’s conception, 

before presenting a note on the problematic terminology of the Anthropocene which brings 

some additional context to the discourse surrounding the more-than-human. 

 

The report’s second chapter extends my contemplation of personal grief and goes on to relate 

it to the general curatorial framing and methodology of the Entangled Intimacies project. This 

begins the project’s essential work of attempting to “become-with” (Wright 2014) the 

innumerable more-than-human processes which are all-too-often avoided within Eurowestern 

culture. My personal experiences of grief following the death of my father are here – via a 

network of interdisciplinary texts and a filmic analysis – related to the chaotic collective 

experiences of life within the environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. This is discussed 

in relation to the potentiality of contemporary curatorial practice as a means of exploring these 

interstitial experiences via necessarily inconclusive research processes. The somewhat 

autoethnographic excursus of the first and second chapters brings attention to a central mortal 

vein which runs throughout the work – one that is perpetually set in relation to the global 

climate crisis and the disciplinary structures which bolster its continuation.  

 

The third chapter of the report critically analyses a select group of curatorial projects which 

have previously engaged the complexity I am attempting to speak to. These works are 

discussed in relation to how they have influenced my own curatorial endeavour. The projects 



 10 

engaged in this chapter (including DON’T/PANIC (2011), Sex Ecologies (2021-2022), and the 

ongoing work of Johannesburg-based not-for-profit arts organisation POOL) come from both 

local South African and international arts ecosystems. This portion of the study features 

primary, secondary, and creative or interpretive research methodologies. This analytical 

section of the report is inspired, in part, by Irit Rogoff’s (2016: n.p.) notion of “embodied 

criticality” – a way of engaging exhibitionary practice that she proposes in opposition to the 

judgmental myopia of criticism. Embodied criticality reorientates curatorial analysis away from 

the reductive (and arguable impossible) aspiration to “find an answer,” instead turning toward 

“questions [themselves] until they point us in some direction we might have not been able to 

predict” (ibid.).  

 

The fourth chapter of this research report critically reflects on my role as an early-career 

curator within the process of realising the Entangled Intimacies exhibition and wider project. 

Here I discuss what I believe to be the conceptual, logistical, and aesthetic successes and 

challenges of the project, and how these may be actualised further into the future by both 

myself and ongoing researchers, curators, and artists. This final chapter of the research report 

also reflects and comments on the engaging creative practices of the artists whose works are 

featured in the exhibition. Spanning a variety of differentiated modes of artmaking, these 

practitioners’ predominantly process-driven or durational pieces constitute the bedrock of this 

project’s central articulation. They extend the exhibition’s conceptual and material reach far 

beyond any singular or normative critique of climate change, pushing it to consider a broad 

range of relational, interconnected concerns. This final chapter of the report reflects on how, 

through this diverse work, the project articulates an acute awareness of how “[o]ur task is to 

make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled 

waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway 2016: 1). These artworks present opportunities to 

consider this violent and incongruous ecological epoch in conversation with a necessarily 

diverse and changeable mixture of political, social, technological, and historical concerns.  

  



 11 

Chapter 1: Some Notes on Death, Opacity, and Terminology 

 

Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that 

weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.  

 – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007: 27, emphasis added) 

 

I know now that my mourning will be chaotic. 

 – Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (2010: 44, emphasis in original) 

 

Chaos is order and disorder, excessiveness with no absolute, fate and evolution. … 

Death is the outcome of the opacities, and this is why the idea of death never leaves 

us. … We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone. 

– Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997: 193-194)3 

 

After the death of my father just over two years ago, the general effect of what we might call 

my grief over his loss has been that my life ceases to piece together. His death came – 

although it had been somewhat imminent since his stage 4 cancer diagnosis a year and a half 

prior – as such an inconceivable shock, such an unbearable break in the fabric of my reality, 

that it caused the formal, informal, and ostensibly insignificant elements which seemed to 

constitute my existence to fall apart. As Joan Didion (2007: 27) states in her kaleidoscopic 

assessment of grief The Year of Magical Thinking, the loss of my father “obliterate[d] the 

dailiness of [my] life.”  

 

Following my parents’ divorce, my father and I lived alone together for roughly 9 years. Two 

of those were spent in the country where we were both born and brought up (the United 

Kingdom) and the rest, up until his death in 2020, were spent in South Africa; a place wholly 

unknown to us. Because our lives were so unmistakably enmeshed, one, in many ways, did 

not exist without the other, and his death threw my now discordantly monological life into 

strange relief. If, before the moment of his loss (if it may be thought of as a singular contained 

moment, rather than the very condition/s of life), there was a taken-for-grantedness of both 

the presence of my father and the system which held him in place, then his death cleaved 

these mutually dependent and unstable realities. On both quotidian and fundamentally 

 
3 As with this first chapter, each section of this research report begins with a few select epigraphs from various 
sources (including, but not limited to, both fiction and nonfiction writings). These extended quotations are placed 
throughout the text as, in line with Sylvia Wynter’s (following Martin Heidegger) (2003: 331) proposition, they “orient 
the reader as the Argument struggles to think/articulate itself outside the terms of the disciplinary discourses of our 
present epistemological order.” These quotes may or may not be directly engaged within their respective sections, 
though they are placed in relation to them in order to allow the reader nondirectional entry points into their various 
themes.  



 12 

experiential levels, these entities were sent adrift within the maelstrom of memories, feelings, 

and forms of embodiment that no longer hold true for me in the same way they did before.  

 

Roland Barthes, in his posthumously published diaries chronicling his tumultuous mourning 

process after the death of his mother, touches on the complicated reality of grief through an 

emphasis on its abstraction. He emotively references the ways a person’s absence can make 

life appear uniquely strange, scratching at the blaringly clear yet persistently deferred spectre 

of mortality that simultaneously steps out of view and brings form to life itself. In its 

overwhelming capacity, Barthes (2010: 58, emphasis in original) is “[s]truck by the abstract 

nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows [him] to understand abstraction 

somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence – perhaps therefore love?” This 

somewhat convoluted, rhetorical statement attempts to bring form to the totally disorientating 

effects of death on the living within an onto-epistemology that systematically occludes ‘life’ 

from ‘death,’ ‘soul’ from ‘body,’ and ‘human’ from ‘nonhuman.’ Barthes’ poetic reflection posits 

that loss allows him better access to the abstract nature of (human) existential reality, while 

also evoking its potential to make way for another form of decidedly more hopeful abstraction; 

that of an undefinable “love” (ibid.).  

 

Édouard Glissant, as shown in this section’s third epigraph, also reflects on the dissonance of 

death – its inconceivable incommensurability – and how this may precipitate a similarly 

productive shift in perception toward his now-famous notion of opacity. Death, he tells us, “is 

the outcome of the opacities, and this is why the idea of death never leaves us” (Glissant 1997: 

194, emphasis added). Despite its inevitability and ever-presence, death – along with its 

associated grief – remains obfuscated and disengaged within contemporary Westernised 

anthropocentric life. Glissant seems to suggest, then, that if we are to reckon with mortality – 

and, therefore, all other imbricated elements of life – we must lean into its imperviousness and 

learn from its unknowability. In other words, intimately familiarising ourselves with the true, 

infinite opacity of existence through its supposedly inevitable loss is essential.  

 

1.1. The artful potentiality of a deathly opacity4 

I am discussing, from the outset of this research report, this fecund theoretical framework of 

opacity in conversation with my own intimate experiences of loss to set the stage for the 

delicate and articulate net of this project’s concerns to come to the fore. The convergence of 

Glissant’s conception of opacity with a highly personalised experience of grief is here 

 
4 The title for this section is partly inspired by the name of Maneo Mohale’s emotive debut poetry collection: 
Everything is a Deathly Flower (2019).  



 13 

performed in order to begin the work of bringing together these ostensibly disparate themes 

into one formal, yet necessarily inconclusive, curatorial project. Melding these textual and 

aesthetic referents here works to home in on this ongoing curatorial research’s central 

concern: the all-encompassing, chaotic socioecological conditions of the Anthropocene. This 

creates space for the vital curatorial work of “[a]ttuning oneself to forms of knowing and being 

that engage different temporal and spatial scales” (Hessler 2020: 267).  

 

Glissant’s consideration of opacity allows us access to an awareness of (or connection to) the 

multiplicity of earthly being which, in his consideration of its varied texturality, becomes visible 

only by focusing on the subjectivities (or opacities) of its individual elements. In his assertion 

that “the idea of totality alone is an obstacle to totality” (Glissant 1997: 192), he implies that 

we cannot gain access to the true nature of being by viewing it as one conglomerated object, 

but that we must instead understand its interconnectedness as a vital web of mutual (and, I 

might add, interdependent) individuality. From a curatorial perspective, if we are to stand a 

chance at engaging this broader texturality of being in relation to the more-than-human 

specifically, we must employ differentiated ways of considering this disastrous time and place. 

In the context of this study, these are “curatorial methodologies that focus on transformation 

and embracing incompleteness, in order to avoid the pitfalls of western thinking and 

adequately respond to the precariousness and uncertainties of climate change” (Hessler 2020: 

267). Here my very subjective take on Glissant’s (1997: 194) notion of death as the “outcome 

of the opacities” is used as a referential and transcendental entry point into a project that 

engages more-than-human perspectives in relation to the climate catastrophe. This works to 

centre the diverse, and oftentimes unsettling, interconnections that characterise terrestrial life 

in this disturbing epochal moment of unmatched anthropogenic ecological crises.  

 

As such, a critical discussion of the fallacious Eurowestern conception of death as an 

unquestionable totality – along with its associated and occlusive finality – arises as a 

theoretical and somatic point of departure orientated towards considering the panoply of more-

than-human experiences within this bound planetary ecology of mutual becoming. This project 

considers this complex interrelatedness through both written and practice-based explorative 

curatorial methodologies to, as Donna Haraway (2016) has famously proposed, “stay with the 

trouble” of this monumental moment of seemingly unbridled ecological destruction. The project 

does not, therefore, in any way mean to suggest that art or curation may be viewed as 

wonderous silver bullet solutions to climate change, but rather that they are indispensable 

means of relating to the vastness of the issues it poses. I am thus proposing we view these 

practices as intimate modes of knowledge production, research, and worldbuilding that are 



 14 

perhaps uniquely positioned to consider the implications of the various and overlapping 

(ecological, social, political, economic, etcetera) crises of our time.  

 

This research endeavours to bring forth moments of embodied thinking and reflection which, 

albeit inescapably human, are orientated towards a consideration of the reality that “to be a 

one [that is, to exist, feel, and die as an ‘individual’ entity in this world] takes much more than 

one” (Haraway 2015: 262). Rather, it takes a cacophonous, orgiastic world of co-constitutive 

more-than-human liveness, mutuality, and collaboration. By using an experimental curatorial 

project as its vessel and linchpin, this research reflects on the complexly volatile reality of 

global climate catastrophe while also avoiding the tendency to reinforce anthropocentric 

worldviews. This is achieved by focusing on artworks and literary references that consider a 

wide gamut of concerns, with particular reference to the articulations and movements of the 

more-than-human world. Curatorial and arts-based research processes are uniquely poised 

to engage these slippery and unruly concepts as they constitute forms of “‘wild’ knowledge 

that … [do] not occur within the space and framework of the expected” (Busch 2009: n.p.). 

Though these processes are “likely to remain inadequate to account for the rich alienness of 

other forms of life” (Hessler 2020: 267), they nonetheless constitute an earnest attempt at 

“staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of this moment that would otherwise be impossible.  

 

1.2. A note on aims and situatedness 

One of the central aims of this research project is to excavate how the potential theoretical-

material interstices between the fine arts, climate change research, curatorial practice, and 

the experimental ecologies have been explored within the South African contemporary arts 

landscape and beyond. I then use this particular contextuality, in conversation with the intimate 

experiences of personal loss, to frame and construct my own critical curatorial engagement 

with these themes. This study is conceptualised within a context that remains aware of the 

socioenvironmental conditions of Johannesburg as a city where the complexly intertwined 

histories of violent resource extraction, capitalism, and coloniality can be intimately and 

quotidianly felt to this day. The intersectional capitalistic, racial, architectural, and 

environmental impacts of the city’s mining history cannot be overstated because, as Sarah 

Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (2007: 281) propose, Johannesburg is littered with “the debris of 

wealth extraction. From all around, among and beyond the gold dumps, the city rises.”  

 

Extractive violence and its ongoing impacts permeate Johannesburg, its human and more-

than-human inhabitants, and its architectures via pervasive material and social remnants. For 

example, dust from the city’s expansive mine dumps (having been picked up by wind currents 

and carried all over the metropolis) interweaves this environment and continues to impact 



 15 

people and nonhuman beings across the city. This still of course effects predominantly lower 

income and racialised peoples as a direct result of the apartheid regime’s racist and uneven 

socioeconomic delegations of space and population division. Indeed, as Kathryn Yusoff (2018: 

xiii) asserts, “[t]he Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of 

the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as 

long as they have been in existence.”5 These socioenvironmental movements which have 

continued impacts on Johannesburg’s inhabitants thus embody “the past that is not past 

[which] reappears, always, to rupture the present” (Sharpe, 2016: 9). This is particularly 

evocative when thought in relation to grief and mourning as ways of relating to the climate 

crises. This is because, in both instances, ostensibly ‘past’ actions or events (the death of a 

loved one and ecological degradation, respectively) are folded over into and onto the present 

moment. The imbricated lived realities of history, the climate crisis, and grief in this way 

perpetually re-assert themselves in this place and time as, to return to Didion (2007: 27), 

“sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness 

of life.”  

 

It is my hope, then, that this work facilitates a conceptual and embodied link between individual 

grief or mourning and the collectively felt onto-epistemological problematics of the 

Anthropocene.  These issues manifest in a variety of different ways but can be most acutely 

felt or considered in relation to how the (human) body engages with, feels, and inhabits its 

environments. The fact that inhabitants of Johannesburg are permeated, to varying degrees, 

by dust deracinated and distributed from the mining process mirrors the recent discovery that 

microplastics now flow freely through our veins (Carrington 2022; Leslie et al. 2022). These 

violent, uncanny, and uncontrolled consequences of extractive (petro)capitalism dislodge the 

fallacious notion that we can, in any way, conceive of human lifeworlds as somehow 

differentiated from those of the more-than-human or environmentally toxic. 

 

The sprawling, violent, and inconclusive conditions of the Anthropocene highlight the reality 

that “the human body [is] not … a citadel, but something porous and vulnerable to exposures. 

The world passes through us and we are not unchanged” (Kenney 2015: 268, emphasis 

added). By following a line of enquiry through personal or individual grief into an assessment 

of this strange environmental moment, this project considers how “we might come closer to 

understanding grief and melancholia as a kind of recognition [of the more-than-human world]. 

A way of … allowing the ungrieved to be grieved and as a form of and perhaps for survival” 

 
5 By remaining aware of (though not conceptually limited by) locality and situatedness, this research work thus 
aims to “ensure that [these] platforms for developing new forms of knowledge are created in ways that contribute 
meaningfully to the writing of local curatorial practices and art histories” (Ntombela 2017: 172). 



 16 

(Harris and Jones 2019: 30). The problematic, embodied conditions of the Anthropocene 

necessitate that we consider these forms of relation anew, remaining always aware of the 

grievous and uncertain implications brought on by anthropogenic environmental degradation.  

 

Creating space to conscientise local artgoing publics towards these pressing realities is 

particularly pertinent within the context of South Africa, due to its precarious position within 

the so-called Global South. This is because these parts of the world are “being forced to pay, 

economically, ecologically and socially, for the effects of climate change in comparison to the 

Global North in relief funds, croplands and lives” (Johnstone 2020: 100). This act of drawing 

attention to the climate catastrophe through curating might thus be conceived as a non-

moralistic enaction of what Maura Reilly (2018) has termed “curatorial activism.” Although 

originally coined to refer to curatorial projects that deal with race, gender, and sexuality, the 

idea of using curating as a means of tacit activism is pertinent with reference also to the 

urgency and pervasiveness of ecological degradation.  

 

1.3. Curatorial opacity in response to climate chaos 

With reference to culturally or artistically orientated practices (such as curation) in particular, 

Amitav Ghosh (2016: 17) proposes that we can understand this moment of ecological disaster 

as “present[ing] a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common-sense 

understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general.” Furthermore, any 

curatorial project which aims to engage – as this one does – questions surrounding the 

convergent more-than-human histories, ecologies, narratives, and materialities that constitute 

existence in this uniquely strange place and time must do more than “compartmentalize 

climate change as a science problem, [as this] limits and misdirects our response to it” (Coats 

2020: 120). In light of this, it becomes clear that the cultural sector must face the tremendous 

challenges posed by the Anthropocene with decisively exploratory and speculative 

frameworks. These are those which operationalise ongoing research, situatedness, and 

speculation towards “the constitution of new realities” (Rogoff 2019: n.p.). This is characterised 

by a movement away from the colonially minded rigidity, facticity, and disciplinarity that has 

done little but plunge us further into the abyss of ecological degradation. It is within the 

complex theoretical-physical mire of association between death, grief, and the embodied, 

more-than-human experiences of the Anthropocene that this project takes on its necessarily 

undulating, opaque, and changeable form.  

 

In line with Glissant’s cautioning against viewing opacity as a totality, this curatorial research 

process is therefore conceived as an open-ended conversation between its constitutive 

written, performative, and artistic elements. The process thus maintains cognisance of its 



 17 

inability to render the true opacity of these pieces or the gestalt of their collective articulation/s. 

This arts-based research endeavours to create a space (both texturally in this research report 

and physically through its practical manifestation) for reflection or exploration where the 

complications and somatic upheavals associated with the “hyperobject” (Morton 2013) of 

climate change may be considered from varied more-than-human perspectives. This is, 

however, performed with an implicit understanding that the inherent limitations of the human 

purview6 will undoubtably preclude any definitive identification with the more-than-human. It is 

orientated, instead, towards the belief that, through careful consideration, we may broaden 

our perspectives away from a purely anthropocentric epistemology.  

 

This work, despite (or perhaps because of) its necessarily nebulous inspiration, further follows 

Glissant’s (1997: 1) poetic notion that “thought in reality spaces itself out into the world.” This 

project is thus also orientated toward asking arguably unanswerable questions around how 

this illusive concept of ‘thought’ (along with its formalised academic cousin known as ‘theory’) 

may be actualised towards creative and/or artistic ends within this internationalised 

environment of violent ecological, social, and corporeal destruction and disintegration. There 

is a tacit hope amongst these words, then, that the dense implications of life in this strange 

epoch – driven, as they are, by seemingly unbridled capitalist degradation, expansion, and 

resource extraction – are, through this project, made to appear to the reader or exhibition 

visitor somewhat (even if only to the most minute degree) otherwise. This follows Ashon 

Crawley’s (2015: 88) assertion that, if we are to imagine and employ the necessarily liberated 

worlds of mutual becoming and thriving required to survive on this planet together, we must 

“be attentive to otherwise possibilities for our existence, to think otherwise possibilities for 

modes of inhabitation.” To believe in the potential for art to facilitate a journey towards this 

strategically othered viewpoint is to be open to the possibility of seeing “[w]hat is and might be 

the grammar of our being” (Brand 2017: 64). 

 

Both the writing process of this research report and the working methodology for its associated 

practical component follow mutable and differentiated – though, of course, also oftentimes 

intersecting – pathways, to various ends. Their mutual and overlapping articulations do not 

claim to answer the greater questions posed by their initial framing/s, but rather work to 

 
6 The idea of a singular human perspective is, of course, impossible to define or argue for also. This is a fallacy 
orientated towards a humanist ideology which, if engaged unquestionably, disregards the incredibly diverse 
nuances that characterise human (and, indeed, more-than-human) experiences. The conception of ‘humanness’ 
as a category has historically been constructed in relation and opposition to an ideological ‘nonhumanness’ which 
has, in turn, been produced within a dense web of colonial racialisation and hierarchisation. For more information 
on this see Wynter’s article “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After 
Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument” (2003), Denise Ferreira de Silva’s book chapter entitled “Before Man: 
Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme” (2015), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s book Becoming Human: 
Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020). 



 18 

propose a moment for thinking- and “becoming-with” (Wright 2014) between the reader/viewer 

and the natural world that is orientated towards a troubling of the violent logics of humanism 

and anthropocentrism. This curatorial research report and its accompanying, exhibition-

centred practical component therefore serve as propositional and overlapping spaces of 

engagement that may precipitate an attunement towards the strangeness of the wider 

environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (2015: 21, 

emphasis in original) suggest that… 

[l]earning to think-with and become-with the uncanny sign of the Anthropocene 

isn’t some fatalistic exercise … but a comportment to the fragility of encounters, 

shared but separated, incommensurate but not lamentable for being so. The 

Anthropocene does not mean we are merely ‘all in it together’; we are in it 

inasmuch as it is in us, this geological reformation, through our shared 

separation. … [A]rt’s labour is both a sensing and a spacing of the shared 

separation of the Anthropocene. … It is best not to approach such an immense 

reality head on, but to come more slowly and from the back, following a queer 

line. 

My work for Entangled Intimacies thus gestures towards the, perhaps utopian, notion that 

“following a queer line” through the mire of signification and embodiment presented to us within 

this catastrophic ecological moment may present a strategically fecund opportunity for 

reflection and critique through art.  

 

For this research, employing explorative methods of contemporary curatorial practice thus 

provides an opportunity to consider the complexities and entanglements that characterise the 

Anthropocene without dogmatically delineating or precluding its expansive impact. Actualising 

an indeterminate curatorial method in relation to this chaotic global ecology therefore asks 

how art might “speak without creating an order that excludes the disorder created by the 

senses” (Martínez 2014: n.p.), and thus precipitates a turn toward the disorderly conditions of 

climate change. This methodology intends to “force the viewer to rethink the relationship 

between the part and the whole: between art and the world” (Christensen and Heise 2018: 

n.p.).  

 

1.4. A note on terminology: ‘Anthropocene’ etcetera 

Before getting into the central articulations of this research, I must first preface and rationalise 

my use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ throughout. Anthropocene is a term which, as I have 

indicated, presents us with a complex linguistic and socioenvironmental challenge. Because 

of this, it should not be utilised in the manner, and to the extent, that this research report does 

without a critique and assessment of its usefulness and problematics. Although the term has 



 19 

now become synonymous with – and, in many ways, inextricable from – climate change 

discourse in the public consciousness and lexicon, the contemporary history of the word (along 

with the many multifaceted terms which have sprung up and been proposed by countless 

scholars in response to it) must be engaged and critiqued here. 

 

The term ‘Anthropocene’ was, according to Will Steffen (2021: 1784), first introduced “by 

atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 at a meeting of the Scientific Committee of the 

IGBP (International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) in Cuernavaca, Mexico.” It was 

conceived as a name for the ecological epoch in which we find ourselves, where human action 

– via the burning of fossil fuels and other known processes of environmental destruction – is 

now having an irrevocable impact on the natural environment. Since its introduction – due to 

its, arguably reductive, catchall nature and convenience – the term has had a meteoric rise in 

fame and usage over the last roughly 20 years, featuring in almost every field of human 

intellectual production. Indeed, from its relatively unknown beginnings, the word has gained 

incredible currency, to the point where it has since been used in everything from mainstream 

pop music to literary studies and, increasingly, the fine arts. Davis and Turpin (2015: 20, 

emphasis in original) put this huge growth in popularity down to the fact that, as they see it, 

“[w]hat most characterizes the Anthropocene is that it is an era of intensity, and the worlds we 

are making through our art practices, science, and research are not made to measure.”  

 

In a strange double bind of semantic hubris, the word Anthropocene – although initially 

conceptualised to render the human impact on the natural environment – inadvertently 

recentres those particular human actors most responsible for ecological degradation 

(overwhelmingly those originating from or based in the Global North). This definitional 

insufficiency has been criticised extensively because the term can thus be seen, at worst, to 

be outrightly dismissive of those (both human and nonhuman) who will suffer 

disproportionately from the climate catastrophe (Haraway and Kenney 2015; Haraway 2016; 

Yusoff 2018; Davis et al. 2019; Johnstone 2020). In an attempt to critique the violent actions 

of humanity in a fallaciously flat, transcendent manner – rather than in one which pins the 

responsibility of climate change upon those who truly deserve it – the Anthropocene thus 

arguably misrecognises the implications of its own conception. Davis et al. (2019: n.p.) assert 

that, “[i]ndeed, the Anthropocene's suggestion that ‘humanity’ writ large is responsible for 

catastrophic environmental change has been the subject of extensive and indispensable 

critique.”  

 

Furthermore, the term has gained widespread criticism due to the fact that, as Yusoff (2018: 

1-2) states, … 



 20 

[i]t has been taken up in the world, purposed, and put to work as a conceptual 

grab, materialist history, and cautionary tale of planetary predicament. Equally, 

this planetary analytic has failed to do the work to properly identify its own 

histories of colonial earth-writing, to name the masters of broken earths, and to 

redress the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves in its wake.  

Yusoff here acutely articulates the immense importance of understanding the ways that the 

linguistic supremacy of the Anthropocene can do more harm than good. This is accelerated 

significantly, she argues, if our usage of this term does not retain a critical awareness of its 

own aims – those orientated toward climate justice (which is, of course, also tied to racial, 

species, economic, and social justice movements). Haraway similarly evokes the cumulative 

and overlapping impacts of the violent legacies Yusoff discusses, but with specific reference 

to more-than-human actors and how (particularly Western) human societies must urgently 

restructure their relationships with them. She asserts that “[w]e are all responsible to and for 

shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, but not in the 

same ways. The differences matter – in ecologies, economies, species, lives” (Haraway 2016: 

116, emphasis added).  

 

In order to redress the true insufficiency of the term to reference that which it attempts to 

summarise, scholars have presented linguistic alternatives to ‘Anthropocene’ in abundance. 

One prominent example is Haraway’s (ibid: 101) term “Chthulucene.” This is employed for its 

ability, for her, to “entangle myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active 

entities-in-assemblages – including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and 

human-as-humus.” The use of this term thus attempts to centre differentiated perspectives, 

those which exist antithetically to the hegemonic social system bell hooks (1984: 18) famously 

calls the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal class structure.” This system upholds, 

through masculinist and economic domination, the processes that continue ecological 

degradation. Haraway’s Chthulucene specifically attempts to draw attention to how this 

nuanced hierarchisation works in relation to the more-than-human.  

 

Two other common portmanteaus which also work to render the socioeconomic factors that 

have influenced the Anthropocene, and which are commonly used in a similar vein to 

Chthulucene, are ‘Capitalocene’ and ‘Plantationocene.’ These terms respectively speak to the 

inherence of capitalism and the plantation (and associated chattel slavery) economy to the 

implementation of ongoing ecological degradation. These terms perform astute considerations 

of the violent histories and presents of extraction, control, and exploitation which are 

unquestionably linked to the contemporary climate crises. However, they remain incredibly 

specific (they are, in many ways, also orientated towards North American ontological 



 21 

conditions) and are thus not necessarily sufficient to engage the globally-defined, more-than-

human perspectives this project hopes to consider.  

 

Throughout this research report I thus use the term Anthropocene in order to bring an, albeit 

insufficient, name to the social and environmental conditions which have precipitated this 

study’s realisation. With a consideration of its problematics, I hope working with this 

complication constitutes an attempt at “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of not only 

the disastrous ecological conditions we are placed within, but also the language we have been 

given to make sense of them. At its best, the Anthropocene presents us with… 

a term that beckons environmental justice thinking, asking what worlds we are 

intentionally and inadvertently creating, and what worlds we are foreclosing 

while living within an increasingly diminished present. … [It thus] creates a need 

to think through the interconnections and interactions of these events in 

conjunction with political economic logics and their attendant debts to the future 

(Davis and Turpin 2015: 6-7). 

Similarly, Astrida Neimanis (2017: 15) proposes that “[t]he idea of the Anthropocene, in its 

most useful sense, places some demands upon humans to account for past actions and 

recalibrate present ones.” It is in this vein that my project hopes to operationalise the language 

of the Anthropocene, alongside that of more-than-human discourse, towards indeterminate 

explorative ends.  

  



 22 

Chapter 2: On Grief as a Prelude to Curatorial Becoming-With 

 

Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers. 

 – Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (2016: 30) 

 

The unknown, … the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance 

is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action … The only thing that makes 

life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. 

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969: 70) 

 

The conscious and unconscious choices we make in relation to language … begin to 

reveal to and for us the ways that – often despite ourselves and our desired politics – 

we remain bound to structures of violence we wish to disavow. Conceiving of ourselves 

as intellectual masters over those bodies of knowledge (broad or discrete) that we 

have tasked ourselves to engage connects us to historical practices of mastery that 

our work seeks to explore and redress. We must with increasing urgency revise the 

very idea of (and the languages we use to describe) our work as intellectuals – with 

what resonances, and toward what possibilities.  

– Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements  

 (2018: 9, emphasis added) 

 

In learning to live with my own abstracting grief, I attempted to ‘make sense’ of it through 

analytical, written processes and academic theorisation; conceptual distractions which were 

ultimately insufficient means of handling such an unquantifiable pain. Indeed, as Helen 

Macdonald (2016: 30) laconically puts it in her poignant memoir on loss, love, and falconry H 

Is for Hawk, “[l]ike a good academic, I thought books were for answers.” Despite its self-

preservatory facet, however, this inclination (perhaps compulsion) toward the abstract and 

written gave way to a path through the mire of grief and isolation I was navigating. Forced, in 

other words, to change the form of my life, the impulse to construct a sensical reality around 

my existence swept in to protect me from the psychically, emotionally, and materially ruinous 

effects of grief. In my search for a sensical sublimatory form for my grief, I looked to queer 

ecology as an epistemology that searches for differentiated means of relating to the natural.  

 

Specifically, I turned to an analytical lens that coupled artistic analysis and queer ecological 

theory, thus taking immense influence (both academically and emotionally) from what I saw 

as this burgeoning field of thought’s unique ability to point to the truly unknowable vastness of 



 23 

the natural world – of which we are of course, for better or worse, an inextricable element.7 I 

wanted to explore ways of thinking outside of the human bodily or Western socio-political 

timescales, ontologies, and epistemologies that had, following my father’s death, led me to 

feel so disconnected from the transcendentally experienced terrestrial processes of living, 

dying, and becoming-with that characterise this planetary bond. Put another way, in retrospect 

I can recognise that the loss of my father (taking place, as it did, within the disfiguring 

environment of an ongoing climate crisis, international pandemics, and growing right-wing 

ideologies) necessitated that I reframe my relationships with the more-than-human elements 

around, within, and constitutive of my own being. In losing the most stable elements of life, 

then, one is struck by the simultaneous multiplicity and isolation of existence. The always 

already tenuous, anthropocentric bedrock supporting the false centrality of human life falls 

away, setting the lumpy yet fecund stage for other(ed) forms to emerge.  

 

2.1. Something akin to hope 

One might say that, through an exploration of the interstitial fields of queer ecology and artistic 

analysis, I was searching for the kernel of hope – that which Barthes (2010: 58, emphasis in 

original) identifies as a form of “love” – within the “abstract nature of absence.” This loss was 

and still is, for me, both intimately familial and collectively felt. Finding (or at least looking for) 

the hopeful glint, albeit oftentimes not immediately recognisable or directly apparent,8 within 

the seemingly overpowering folds of grief and toxicity that pervade our lives is a practice of 

learning to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of loss in its myriad forms. It is an act born 

of both the isolating, indefinite, and continued work of learning to live without someone as well 

as the violent, unevenly distributed implications of sharing an increasingly toxic planet. I am 

articulating the elision of these two, seemingly dissonant ideas here in order to pre-emptively 

gesture toward the imbricated reality of these affective forms. While the loss of a family 

member is often an intimate and painfully personalised experience, its inescapability intersects 

(as, this project argues, does everything) with all other kinds of being – at turns painful and 

joyous – in this intricately interconnected planetary ecology known as Earth. 

 

 
7 My Honours research paper, completed in 2021, was particularly concerned with this concept. Entitled “Gesturing 
Beyond the Human: The Queer Ecological Imagination in Contemporary South African Art,” this research paper 
engaged and analysed select contemporary South African artworks from a queer ecological perspective. For more 
information on queer ecology see Timothy Morton’s article “Guest Column: Queer Ecology” (2010), Karen Barad’s 
article “Nature's Queer Performativity” (2011), Nicole Seymour’s book Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the 
Queer Ecological Imagination (2013), and Jonathan Mullins’ article “Queer Ecology: Shared Horizons after 
Disturbance” (2020). 
 
8 Indeed, the processual act of eking out inklings of hope may not even be intentional or identifiable as such to the 
person performing it at the time of its enaction. This was indeed the case with the writing-theorising-feeling process 
I somewhat unintentionally employed following my father’s death. 



 24 

I do not evoke the ethereal concept of hope as/or love here in an uptake of some kind of blind 

positivity (or, indeed, a human-centric positivism), but rather to render how a Glissantian 

opacity has manifested within my own interstitial experiences of grieving, relating to, and 

becoming-with the lively processes that mark our terrestrial being. The engagements within 

my previous research of the intricate relationality between ecological theory, emotive memory, 

embodiment, and the knottily interlaced reality of earthly, more-than-human being can be seen 

as an ideological precursor to this project’s speculative proposition. This curatorial work 

continues this kind of tentative extraction of hope from loss by utilising it within a more material, 

practice-centred form. Thinking additionally with the fecund lens of critical opacity alongside 

that of experimental ecology, we might also posit here that the perceived nonsensicality of 

dying and/or grieving can give rise to a potentiality within the complex arena of the 

Anthropocene. 

 

Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones, in thinking about the queered and mournful implications 

of this violent ecological epoch we find ourselves in, also evoke the principal of love within 

their poetic considerations of both anthropomorphic and ecological grief. Amidst this 

inarticulate storm of environmental loss and uncertainty, Harris and Jones (2019: 27, 

emphasis added) propose that we should try to “use writing about loss as a reminder that the 

promise of love always contains, ultimately, the promise of grief. That to avoid grief is to avoid 

love altogether.” It is this aim or principal of utilising creative practices (be they written, 

curatorial, poetic, or more formally artistic) as means of conceptualising the intertwined 

realities of grief in this orgiastic, more-than-human milieu that this chapter performs – albeit in 

a roundabout way. The aim here is thus to work toward an understanding of… 

ourselves as bodies among and in relationship with other bodies (animal-

bodies, thing-bodies, plant-bodies) that help us to understand our own individual 

grief, suffering and mourning, as interconnected with the degradation of the 

planet, a continuum of alienation that has reached epic proportions (ibid.: 20). 

From this point of departure, this project is conceived as an attempt to gesture toward the 

ineffable, at once mournful and potentially critically productive, realities of earthly embodiment 

through/as anthropogenic climate change.  

 

These realities – much like the feelings associated with what we come to know as grief – are 

intimately and pervasively felt, but increasingly allusive in their undefinable form, presence, 

and embodiment. Taking my own, arguably quite common, experiences of human mourning 

as a starting point, then, I conceive of grief here as making life uncannily abstract in its 

seemingly violent and absolute finitude. Along with this uniquely abstracting process, we could 

also conceptualise an opening up of the milieu of the experiential or agential (not necessarily 



 25 

human) subject to take cognisance of other(ed) forms of terrestrial reality, temporality, 

materiality, affect, embodiment, and understanding. This may (or, equally, in line with thinking 

the potentialities of the project more broadly, may not) be effectively articulated here via an 

exploration into the opaquely outstretched, tentacular, and unruly points of convergence 

between Anthropocene studies, experimental ecological theory, the posthumanities, feminist 

and queer ecologies, and concepts surrounding more-than-human worlding (the list goes on). 

 

Following this line of thinking, here I would like to ask how might we make use of the 

abstraction of grief – of death’s perceived boundedness – toward conjuring both human and 

more-than-human realities otherwise? How can we best orientate, in Barthes’ terminology, 

toward something akin to a love for (or, perhaps more accurately, an intimate mutuality or 

relationality with) those who have ‘gone,’ those who are still ‘here,’ and those whose bodies 

flow somewhere in between this false duality? Thinking further with Glissant, how might we 

also find, and hold onto, an opacity in relation to both post- and more-than-human forms or 

processes of embodiment in this precarious moment of ecological, social, and political crisis 

(particularly within and across the disciplinary landscapes that foreground anthropocentric 

facticity and dense scientific discourses)?  

 

These are questions that this research fundamentally cannot answer. I nonetheless evoke 

them here at an early stage of the project’s processual unfolding, however, to propose an 

explorative framework for the ongoing work it performs in and through the world that continues 

to mould its uncertain form. In an effort to provide a speculative entry point into the nebulous 

concepts this research thinks with, I now turn to a discussion of a film which sits at an uncanny 

point of convergence between my own reflective experiences of mourning and the wider 

conceptual concerns of the Entangled Intimacies project.  

 

2.2. Tenacious snails: the slipperiness of death, decay, and more-than-human 

embodiment 

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) is one of the last films I can remember 

watching with my father before he died. This strange arthouse film about grief, decay, captivity, 

and more-than-human relationality seems strikingly prescient in retrospect. Now appearing to 

me as a spectre of things to come, this cinematic memory has laid dormant in the folds of my 

mind for quite some time, only resurfacing as I reckoned with how to enter into the process of 

writing this text. As a true cinephile at heart, my father introduced me to a wide variety of films 

– both alternative and ‘mainstream’ – throughout my upbringing, though it is this one that 

seems to re-present itself again and again in my mind, finding mnemonically and bodily 

disruptive pathways into the contemporary moment. In thinking with this film as part of this 



 26 

transdisciplinary journey, I attempt to make sense of why I find myself so drawn to the 

complicated enmeshment of the climate catastrophe and its somatic implications. This also 

gives way to wondering how a curatorial intervention into these ideas may serve as one of the 

few forms of knowledge production potentially capable of intimately engaging their 

pervasiveness.  

 

A Zed & Two Noughts follows distraught zoologist twin brothers Oliver and Oswald Deuce as 

they grieve over the simultaneous violent deaths of their wives in a car crash, caused by a 

swan on the street outside the zoo at which they both work. In attempting to bring order to 

their now seemingly nonsensical lives, the brothers turn, in their respective ways, to obsessing 

over the circumstantial and coincidental events surrounding the accident. Alongside this 

hyper-analysis of the crash and its (social, meteorological, environmental, etcetera) minutiae, 

they also turn to what is, to them, the solid ontological grounding of their scientific discipline – 

one undergirded, as it is, by anthropocentric observatory facticity and Darwinian evolutionary 

hierarchies. Specifically, over the course of the film, Oliver is seen obsessively rewatching 

David Attenborough's eight-part natural history docuseries Life on Earth (1979) while Oswald, 

in the zoology lab, creates painstaking experiments to photographically document the 

decompositions of various natural organisms (figure 1). These include – amongst others – 

apples, a bowl of prawns, an alligator, a dalmatian, a swan, and a zebra. The tactics they both 

employ, however, prove fundamentally unfruitful.  

 
Figure 1 – still from Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed & Two Noughts, 1985. This image depicts a collection of apples 

being photographically documented through various states of decay while, in the background, the dead body of a 

crocodile decomposes under the same photographic observation.  



 27 

 

The incessant mournful clamour within the brothers appears to grow stronger throughout the 

film, despite their rigorous and epistemic engagements with the ostensibly measurable 

elements of this ultimately analytically impervious world. Indeed, in her vibrant and engaged 

analysis of the film, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (2003: 56, emphasis in original) asserts that 

the film… 

suggests that the brothers' problem is one of perspective or outlook, not one of 

lack of information. While their emotional pain is real, it is exacerbated, not 

helped, by an error in epistemology: they approach life and death as an 

antinomy – as life or death – an oppositional binary that calls for a resolution in 

favor of one or the other term. Were the brothers to adopt a more ecologically 

informed understanding of life and death processes, they would realize that life 

and death exist along a continuum that is cyclical, not linear. They would also 

realize that their pain cannot simply be explained away. 

In asserting that the film’s protagonists are presented to the viewer as lacking in an appropriate 

or well-adjusted perspective on mortality, Willoquet-Maricondi here suggests that to learn from 

the film’s internal moral logic is to gain an understanding of life, death, decomposition, and 

wider being as not only always ecologically, somatically, or psychically interrelated. Following 

her thinking, we can also posit that to be in considerate relation to more-than-human beings 

is also to deconstruct the self-evidence of anthropocentric disciplinarity and the false 

dichotomy between the so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. This dovetails with the central 

concepts of my project insofar as it works to bring form to the ways that siloed and hardened 

disciplinarity – particularly with regards to thinking otherwise with the more-than-human – is 

an insufficient, if not outrightly violent, means of engagement.  

 

As the brothers continue deeper into the boggy entrapments of grief, they can, on multiple 

occasions, be heard poetically reflecting on how long it takes the human body to decay. 

Toward the end of the film, amidst the din of clanging camera flashes in the decomposition 

lab, Oliver ruminates on the precluding nature of anthropocentric timescales and lifeworlds, 

and the associated inclination – albeit futile – to wield taxonomic order over these indiscrete 

processes. He says: 

I sit here for hours. It’s like sitting among lighthouses. Each lighthouse giving 

you a bearing on lost spaces of time. For tens of thousands of photographs [are] 

taken here, all taken very patiently because decay can be very slow. Nine 

months for the human body, they say (A Zed & Two Noughts 1985).  

In conceiving of the mechanised apparatuses used to document these forms of organic matter 

in various states of decay as lighthouses orientating the viewer to lost spaces of time, Oliver 



 28 

performs a literalising figuration wherein human means of navigation are metaphorically used 

toward an understanding of something outside of his linear comprehension. His fixation on the 

documentation and concretisation of this natural process within observable scientised time, 

however, denies him a connection to the reality he desperately seeks. The film argues, then, 

that the aqueous, undulating, and more-than-human abstract temporalities that guide the 

modes of embodiment (in various states of ‘animation’) which exist outside of the human 

epistemological purview outrightly resist any form of singularisation or observation. 

 

In a strange suturing of the grief they are experiencing and the obstinate scientific lens through 

which they observe it, the brothers’ preoccupation with the decomposition process thus then 

turns to that of the human body. This comes to a head in the final section of the film, in which 

they attempt to document their own decay through photographic evidence after mutually 

injecting each other with some form of unnamed lethal substance. The following morning, 

however, their plan is foiled when an influx of snails invades the wooded field Oliver and 

Oswald have chosen for their experiment, along with their bodies and the scientific equipment 

set up to photograph their decomposition (figures 2 and 3). The snails’ unruly and bumptious 

presence literally short-circuits the apparatus with which the twins were posthumously 

expecting to image their own bodily entropy. This conclusive assertion of ecological ‘poetic 

justice’ (for lack of a better term) renders the true futility of the twins’ macabre experiment(s) 

and, more generally, their anthropocentric epistemologies. David Pascoe (1997 cited in 

Willoquet-Maricondi 2003: 70, emphasis added) thus asserts that “[t]he twins were destroyed 

by the very system of representing the world they so punctiliously established; their 

investigation ends in failure because the world refuses to be constrained by artificial 

discourses, and nature overcomes the limits of their devices and desires.”  

 

2.3. Relinquishing mastery 

The snails in A Zed & Two Noughts’ final scene, through their (from an anthropocentric lens) 

inconsequential yet tenacious being, articulate the true opacity of the natural in the face of a 

humanist taxonomy. Following this line of thinking, these unrelenting and disruptive 

gastropodous bodies might also be seen as a prototypical example of why we must – when 

thinking inescapably within the sensuous lexicon of the ever-tenuous human – resist the notion 

that we can obtain mastery over the ecological. Like Oliver and Oswald, we too collectively 

now inhabit a (politically, emotionally, somatically, ecologically, etcetera) broken world. Here 

the intellectual systems propping up the unity or singular totality of the human body, the 

Western capitalist culture that affirms its existence, and the more-than-human environment 

which has been (linguistically, economically, and politically) constructed to serve them both, 

all sit at precarious states of disrepair. This presents us with the oppositional possibili ties of 



 29 

either dogmatically following an anthropocentric epistemology toward its, and our, own 

inevitable demise9, or to do the troublesome yet potentially productive work required to think 

outside of this structure. This is where deconstructing the humanist, colonial notion of mastery 

in favour of a practice of becoming-with may be invaluably useful, which is what this project 

begets.   

 

 
Figures 2 (top) and 3 (bottom) – stills from Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed & Two Noughts, 1985. These images 

show the more-than-human calamity brought about by the snails on the twin brothers’ final, posthumous 

experiment.  

 
9 This mode of relation would be akin to that which the twins in A Zed & Two Noughts attempt, mournfully yet 
unsuccessfully, to employ.  



 30 

Julietta Singh (2018: 20), in her kaleidoscopic engagement with humanist and decolonial 

theories, posits that “[t]he act of unthinking mastery is … a vehicle through which we can begin 

to change fundamentally our thinking and practices of this style of being human.” This style of 

humanness here perhaps refers to that which constructs a false hierarchy placing the human 

at a position of authority and moralistic, colonial sovereignty over all the land, the sea, and 

their expansive inhabitants. To resist an anthropocentric mastery is then to “begin to exile 

ourselves from feeling comfortable at home [in disciplinarity] …, turning instead toward forms 

of queer dispossession that reach for different ways of inhabiting our scholarly domains – and 

more primordially, of inhabiting ourselves” (ibid.: 8). Singh’s evocation of a primordial 

inhabitation in the (human) body and self, one unmediated by epistemologies or 

theoretical/scientific frameworks, reiterates the need to hold onto Glissant’s opacities, in both 

a metaphysical and literal sense.  

 

Glissant (1997: 190) asserts that we must learn from the infinite ability of the opacities to 

“coexist and converge.” He shows us that these expanding forms are continually “weaving 

fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the 

nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with 

discovering what lies at the bottom of natures” (ibid., emphasis added). Yielding to the 

ecologically aligned weave of opacities is thus inherently an act of unthinking mastery, one 

that may create space for attunement to other(ed) textualities within this fabric of all-

encompassing and multiplicitous opacity. Inspired by the potentiality of opaque thinking, this 

project – in both its written and practice-based research forms – thus resists the formalised 

need to perform an intellectually and artistically stifling intelligibility, particularly within the 

context of the nonsensical imbricated naturecultural (Haraway 2016: 125) environment of the 

Anthropocene.  

 

By employing abstract and collective modes of thinking and artmaking, the work performed by 

this explorative curatorial project is thus characterised by an opaque, transversally orientated 

framework. This constitutes, both theoretically and in a form of praxis, an attempt to tentatively 

enact what famed author Ursula K. Le Guin (1969: 70) – in what is arguably her most prescient 

work of speculative fiction The Left Hand of Darkness – refers to as “unproof.” This unproof, 

in my employment of the term, is seen as a conceptual form of non-mastery orientated towards 

an explorative journey that exists outside of the reductive ‘fact’ versus ‘fiction’ (or, equal ly, 

‘theory’ versus ‘practice’) duality. As shown in this chapter’s second epigraph, for Le Guin, 

(ibid.) “unproof is the ground for action.” This philosophical modality inherently does not lead 

to any foreclosed or definitive answer, solution, or destination, but rather necessitates a 

journeying toward the perpetually unknowable. It encourages a consideration of life that is 



 31 

orientated away from the epistemological strictures imposed on more-than-human 

relationality, those which occlude the potential for conviviality between the human individual 

and their planetary kin (human and otherwise). 

 

Similarly, art historian and curator Chus Martínez (2012: 48) calls this mode of working and 

thinking a process of “disowning knowledge.” Far from a form of ignorance, or even anti-

intellectualism, this is a process which entails – via a non-specific mode of journeying 

otherwise through the conceptual and corporeal alike – “a function that provides clues toward 

a mystery, that is: how to live in a groundless world” (ibid.: 49, emphasis added). As both A 

Zed & Two Noughts and the increasing uninhabitability of this planet show us, the normative 

anthropocentric forms of knowledge we use to relate to this place which we all share have 

proven to only contribute to its accelerated destruction. Contemporary curatorial practice is 

one of the few artistic and research-orientated processes defined by its drive toward 

explorative and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production that do not presuppose or 

preclude their own outcomes. In this way, it presents itself as a potential conduit for the kind 

of necessarily undefinable, process-driven work needed to engage the climate catastrophe in 

differentiated ways. 

 

Languishing in, and thinking with, opacity as a mode of disowning knowledge within a more-

than-human milieu can thus productively unmoor us from the fallacious yet assertive fixity of 

anthropocentric, disciplinary mastery. Via a process grounded in curatorial theory and 

practice, this project then tries to make sense of (or at least create space to think around) our 

collective fragmentation and grief amidst the unnameable – as of yet unknown but intimately 

felt – entanglements that characterise life in this precarious time and place.  

  



 32 

Chapter 3: Curating Climate Chaos 

 

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to 

have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. 

 – Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928: 16) 

 

‘[A]rt’ is above all the name of that which remains clear of ends and goals. ‘Art’ – 

provided we do not confuse it with decoration, the aesthetic, the museum, or the art 

market, nor with subjectivity, ‘commitment,’ etc. – means: technique … without an end 

or goal. 

– Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Existence of the World Is Always Unexpected”  

(2015: 90, emphasis in original) 

 

The ‘more-than-human’ is a kind of antidote to our current crisis. It's a way of thinking 

another possibility, it is critical we recognise our interconnectedness into everything 

around us. I think part of signalling this in exhibition practice is to allow for seepages 

and a porosity within work and in relation to institutional forms so as to trouble the limits 

and edges of both. Another means of pointing to this interconnectedness is to keep a 

project in flux, in a state of becoming and evolving – resisting both fixity and singularity. 

– Amy Watson (2023: n.p.) (appendix 2) 

 

In her transgressively queer ‘biographical’ novel Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf – while 

describing a particularly fraught moment of poetic anguish for the story’s then-adolescent 

titular character – pontificates on the ultimate insufficiency of artistic practices for rendering 

the true vibrancy of the natural world. Upon coming across a laurel bush which derails 

Orlando’s bumptious writing process, s/he is struck by the inability of language to render its 

complexity. The book’s narrator (or, as they are satirically referred to throughout the novel, its 

biographer) informs us that the young writer’s disconcertion can be attributed to the fact that 

“[g]reen in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a 

natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces” (Woolf 1928: 16, 

emphasis added).  

 

This somewhat violent visual analogy, wherein nature and letters (the latter of which here 

stand in for all forms of human artistic pursuit) quite literally destroy each other, sets the stage 

for Orlando’s central struggle throughout the novel. This is one that persists throughout their 

over 300-year-long life – during which they spontaneously metamorphose from male to female 

at roughly age 30 – and which forms a pivotal theme for the character’s metatextual lifework 



 33 

poem “The Oak Tree.” This ongoing struggle is predominantly concerned with how art may 

allow us to trouble the stringent Eurowestern epistemological frameworks that place nature at 

odds with (human) expression – those which moralistically impose themselves upon the 

slippery infinitude of mortality, sexuality, gender, and, overarchingly, nature itself.  

 

Woolf does not, however, outrightly denounce language (and, therefore, art more broadly) as 

some cumbersome burden in perpetual opposition to the complexities of life but, rather, as 

something with the potential to give rise to new pathways of relationality. Elise Swinford (2011: 

198), in her analysis of Orlando’s explorations of grief, gender, and nature, similarly asserts 

that… 

just as the illusive nature of Orlando’s gender is not an obstacle but instead 

another vehicle through which he gains varied life experiences, literature as 

illusion does not necessarily carry with it the negative implications of a lie or 

deception – literature is deceiving to the point that all language is a deception, 

a necessary but often hindering tool of self definition. 

For Orlando (and perhaps equally Woolf herself), then, language is a tool to transmogrify, 

rather than disfigure, the natural within creative processes of personal and collective growth. 

Despite the mutual antipathy Woolf describes between nature and language, she suggests 

that it is in fact our necessary task, through creative pursuits, to nonetheless attempt to bring 

forth the reality of the un/natural here and now – albeit via the insufficient, anthropocentric 

tools at our disposal. 

 

Orlando thus asks us to consider how artistic pursuits can be actualised towards reconfiguring, 

reframing, or – as may be necessary – outrightly rejecting the stifling disciplinary contexts we 

inhabit, in order to articulate the true and radical unknowability of more-than-human worlds. 

Perhaps, in this way, through creative work we collectively embody a perpetual state of 

becoming, as Orlando does in terms of both their gender and poetic expression. Herein we 

are always working toward the goal of making sense of this chaotic moment, despite knowing 

it may well be ultimately futile. With reference to curating specifically, taking this into 

consideration helps us to “conceptualize and even implement new forms of world making that 

are fluid, rather than static, and always in the process of becoming, rather than fully resolved” 

(Hessler 2020: 259). 

 

Orlando here not only facilitates an interdisciplinary connection between literature and the fine 

arts, but also, conceptually, it aligns to this project’s underlying themes centred on “staying 

with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of the Anthropocene. Despite Woolf’s assertion that nature 

and language are incongruent, Orlando’s persistence in completing and publishing their 



 34 

magnum opus “The Oak Tree” – an extended poem about life and nature – towards the end 

of the book results in its commercial success. This success is not, however, followed by a 

positively conclusive ending to the story, but rather one which famously leaves the eponymous 

character’s fate open to mutable change into the future. The incommensurable duality 

between resolution and incompleteness upon which the novel is (un)resolved might be read, 

in the context of this study, as a strategic artful “opacity” (Glissant 1997: 189) orientated 

towards creative exploration in the face of dogmatic, preclusive, and destructive environmental 

or socioecological conditions.  

 

I have thus chosen to open this third chapter of my research report – which will go on to 

discuss previous curatorial projects that have engaged climate change and/or ecological 

thinking to varying degrees – with an extended reference to Orlando as, in both form and 

content, it tacitly gestures towards the aims of this study. My reference to Woolf’s skilfully 

constructed, dynamically queered ecological lens is not intended to place too heavy an 

emphasis on the literary within my curatorial work, but rather to add another facet or entry 

point to its explorative aims. Contemporary cultural work concerned with climate change (and 

more-than-human relationality more broadly) is, by definition, concerned with a world of 

messiness and chaos, and this study’s referential texts (including Orlando and A Zed & Two 

Noughts) are thus equally multivocal and diverse.  

 

These texts set out a research framework that reflects Elena Filipovic’s (2013: 17-18) claim 

that exhibition making (and curatorial practice more broadly) should be viewed as a “place for 

engagement, impassioned thinking, and visceral experience ... but not necessarily as the 

platform for the sort of empirical knowing that we have all too often been led to believe is 

important to the artwork and the exhibition alike.” This intertextual strategy pieces together an 

appropriately variegated inspirational plurality of intergenerational, transdisciplinary, and 

perhaps even multispecies interlocutors. These are all speaking – albeit in different tones, 

pitches, frequencies, volumes, and timbres – of a common goal of planetary kinship, intimacy, 

and collaboration. As mentioned above, this plurality is orientated toward the impossibly 

cryptic but vital question of “how to live in a groundless world” (Martínez 2012: 49) – both 

collectively and subjectively.  

 

This multivocal framework is taken forward into the remainder of this chapter. It discusses and 

analyses a group of local and international contemporary curatorial projects aimed at the broad 

questions concerning climate change, partly via Rogoff’s (2016: n.p.) concept of “embodied 

criticality.” This concept is activated in an effort to move away… 



 35 

from criticism which is a form of finding fault and of exercising judgement 

according to a consensus of values, to critique which is examining the 

underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing 

logic, to criticality which is operating from an uncertain ground of actual 

embeddedness (ibid.).  

In this way, mine and the reader/viewer’s embeddedness within this curatorial study and the 

climate catastrophe are thought through and analysed in relation to these previous projects, 

but not as critical arbiters of their ‘success’ or ‘failure’ to achieve any given aims. This process 

is thus employed through a lens of explorative criticality and reflection, rather than one of 

myopic criticism which precludes collaborative cross-pollination of curatorial concepts and 

practices. 

 

3.1. On the im/possibility of environmental overemphasis  

The question of how best to engage the anthropogenic climate disaster through curatorial 

practice has posed a dense and multifaceted challenge to arts practitioners since its 

recognition as an unparalleled problem facing earthly life on a global stage. One significant, 

institutionally funded curatorial project that thought with and through this environment of 

ecological precarity within a South African locality was DON’T/PANIC (figures 4 and 5). 

Curated by Gabi Ngcobo and held at the Durban Art Gallery between 28 November and 11 

December 2011, this work was timed to coincide with the COP17 United Nations Climate 

Change Conference which was also being held in Durban across the same dates. The project 

featured a selection of public programming events and a catalogue (published by Jacana 

Media) to accompany its central exhibitionary element10 – all of which were funded by and 

produced in collaboration with the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, Goethe-Institut South 

Africa, and Heinrich Böll Foundation. 

 

Ngcobo (2011: 9) asserts that the project saw itself as “responding to the subject of climate 

change, with the aim of unsettling both those who snub the subject and those who pay it an 

overwhelming amount of attention.” It is this suggestion that an individual, exhibition, or other 

creative research endeavour could in fact “pay [climate change] an overwhelming amount of 

attention” (ibid.) upon which I focus throughout my analysis of DON’T/PANIC in this section.11 

 
10 The exhibition featured artworks by many prolific local and international artists including Clive van den Berg, 
Dineo Seshee Bopape, David Koloane, Donna Kukama, and Penny Siopis.  
 
11 Before conducting my engagement with DON’T/PANIC, it is necessary to first acknowledge that my analysis of 
the project is based purely on viewing the show through photographic documentation and textual remnants (the 
same can be said for my discussion of Sex Ecologies below). As I was not able to experience it in person, my 
understanding of the show inevitably comes from an unfortunately limited perspective – gleaned predominantly 
from the exhibition catalogue and other online sources. I have nonetheless chosen to focus on the exhibition in this 
section as I feel it is a vital project to discuss in relation to the progressive arch of (South African) curating in relation 



 36 

In relation to my own conceptual and curatorial frameworks which view the climate catastrophe 

as enmeshed within and through the condition/s of our being, this conception is critiqued as 

representing a somewhat dualistic attitude to the unquestionably pervasive effects of climate 

chaos. I thus conclude that it is arguably impossible to, as Ngcobo suggests, overemphasise 

climate change – particularly within a creative project orientated toward its effects, but also 

more generally in wider practice. This notion is also discussed in relation to Ngcobo’s 

professional tendency toward strategic methodologies of refusal within her wider curatorial 

practice – a concept akin to my implementation of Glissantian opacity. This relates to Ngcobo’s 

conception of art (with particular refence to the climate disaster) as a form of knowledge that 

“occup[ies] the space between that which can be done and that which remains impossible” 

(ibid.), from which I have gleaned a great deal of inspiration.  

 

Figure 4 – still from the DON'T/PANIC - Open Forum at Durban Art Gallery YouTube video, produced by Goethe-

Institut Subsaharan Africa. This image shows an example of a public arts-centered event concerned with climate 

change in South Africa – held at the exhibition DON’T/PANIC, 2011, curated by Gabi Ngcobo at the Durban Art 

Gallery. 

 

The curatorial concept for DON’T/PANIC was centred around an exhibition which featured 

artworks that were either referentially or tacitly related to climate change, or which were in fact 

produced without it in mind at all. Ngcobo’s (ibid.: 10-11) …  

primary [curatorial] approach [for this project] was to read into images, 

experiences and processes in which artists are not necessarily making direct 

 
to the Anthropocene, which this chapter partly takes as its focus. Furthermore, despite its importance within the 
wider gamut of local curatorial projects related to climate chaos, there is relatively little public information available 
about DON’T/PANIC. Addressing it here thus also encourages further engagement within similar future projects.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUwskLFMqh0


 37 

comments on issues of climate change. What [she] was most interested in were 

moments where the artwork slips through certain barriers and where artistic 

practices reflect the inability to separate creative pursuits with how we relate to 

the spaces we inhabit – the environment in its broadest sense.  

What is most interest