DREAMING & LUCIDTY
2024
Video still from Dreaming & Lucidity (film) 2024 © Catriona Towriss.
Drone footage from Inka Kendzia
“Dreaming and Lucidity” is a sculpture and performance created in the Tankwa Karoo, South Africa, as part of the Tankwa Artscape artist residency.
The sculpture is created from the sticks collected from the thorny and invasive Mesquite trees that grow along the bed of the Tankwa River, and forms a shelter. This shelter is for the traces of life that, while no longer visible, remain strongly present on the land: the ancient ocean that once covered this landscape, the |Xam people killed by colonial genocide, the herds of springbok brought to near-extinction by European hunters, and the flocks of sheep, fed on the seeds of the Mesquite Trees, who temporarily replaced them.
Video stills from Dreaming & Lucidity (film) 2024 © Catriona Towriss.
Drone footage from Inka Kendzia
The performance was inspired by the night I spent sleeping alone under the stars, at the site of the sculpture. During this night, I experienced the Tankwa as a space of existence between realms, a place of “dreaming and lucidity” where the spirits of these past-lives can be heard.
Here
In this place, where
The veil between sleeping and waking, between
Dreaming and lucidity
Is pulled back
I listened for what was unseen
A rock began to roar with the noise
Of an ancient ocean.
And time was swept off its feet
I searched through a gaping absence for |Xam
Who showed me circular shelters,
Hugging the horizon
The wind transporting their stories from the stars
At dawn a current of Springbok moving
Across the plateaus to their winter grazing
Chased by khaki-clad ghosts with guns
The seeds of the thorny new arrivals feed
Flocks of sheep, jostling
Liberated from the scars of iron fences
For days
I spoke with the spirit of the Tankwa River, Cracked into a dry clay bed
The cosmos is in swift movement
But
Here we all gather
Where the past
And the present
And the future
Coalesce
Into
Now
Collaborating musicians: Kamil Hassim (drum), Jane Mpholo (voice) and Iman Adams (voice and shaker).
Performance image credits: Sara Carneiro, Mona Hannekom, Bronwyn Trupp.