community reflections

The sustaining lifeblood of Keiskamma Art Project (KAP) in Hamburg, Eastern Cape, lies in the communal—and communing—form of collective embroidery, which produces beautiful, often monumental, tapestries. The making of these artworks offers vital livelihoods in the region and the collective process of making them supports transformations that are hard to put into words. There are intangible changes: effects felt in shared and individual lives through the memory and communication of experience, through witnessing and reflection and, finally, through the translation of collective experience into something material.

I succeeded Carol (Baker) Hofmeyr as manager at Keiskamma Art Project in February 2020. We had time for two brief handover meetings before she left South Africa for Botswana with her husband Justus. Just a month later, in late March, along with the rest of the world, we were plunged into the chaos and confusion of Covid-19 and a hard lockdown. I was daunted by the task before me. I had very little knowledge of what I know now—and, to be honest, no idea of the complexities of managing a rural NGO that employs over 50 people and creates inestimably significant work.

The first shocks came then: 50 people looking to me for leadership through an unprecedented crisis. After working mainly in design and curatorship, it took me a while to realise that my new management role at that time had little to do with visual material culture (though this knowledge was critical) and everything to do with leadership. In other words, the position of management was not about art or design alone; it was about caring for human beings in critical circumstances that pre-dated, and would extend beyond, Covid-19. At the time there was an impossibly large payroll, some historical debt, salaries to be paid and no means of generating the income to sustain us. Further, there was the uncertainty we all went through of not knowing how long we’d be in lockdown, nor how we would communicate when everyone was apart, not excluding managing the fear of the disease itself.

With the artists no longer able to work together in the studio, the very real prospect of work drying up pressed upon us. How would we keep piecemeal work going so as to ensure income for the artists and embroiderers? How would we cover our payroll? The pandemic was a stark illuminator of pre-existing fractures and inequalities in society. It certainly shed a harsh light on the precarious circumstances of KAP as a not-for-profit organization (NPO). Having lost all buffers and safety nets in social and economic terms, we were forced to confront what was unsustainable about our structure. It would take us many months to determine how best to approach this. In the meantime we knew that, without meaningful work, our mandates could not be realised.

The ethos of the African proverb, ‘While you pray, move your feet’ is best expressed by rural women, and the adage had an urgent relevance when navigating the hard lockdown. I wrestled with this community’s legacy of hope, feeling the injustice of hope when it so often engenders powerlessness and an openness to fate. We had to bring about a shift from a kind of fearful paralysis, from the observation of history being made, to making history in the present moment, through hands and feet taking action.

Our action was aided by technology. Our ‘technological turn’ as an organisation was ultimately fuelled by WhatsApp. WhatsApp was our moon landing, giving us the ability to communicate across rough and uncharitable geography.  We created a WhatsApp group and a data allowance for every person to identify and rectify the Covid misinformation, prolific at the time, breeding fear among community members at home. WhatsApp could also serve as a place to share important links and notices. We sensed what technology could mean in an area geographically isolated and cut off, ostensibly, from more resourced cosmopolitan centres. (Today, our Covid-era technological lifeline is used in every commission or collaboration, to connect clients or visiting artists with the team in Hamburg and to share process and images as references. Everything can be usefully stored in this digital communal archive.)

Soon afterwards, we engaged another emergent technology built around the power of growing online communities. We started a crowd-funding campaign on the Thundafund platform, as a kick starter for a planned tapestry we spoke about as a ‘resilience tapestry.’ This was its intention in every way: let us picture resilience and let us work towards it. With the loving support of many stalwart KAP friends, R80 000 was raised—enough to inject our first months with optimism. We were also enormously grateful for National Arts Council (NAC) funding, initially earmarked for arts education programmes in schools, which we could channel in other ways as schools had closed during the hard lockdown.

As soon as we could gather again, and a portion of people could return to work, we began production. Longtime collaborator and friend of Keiskamma Art Project, the author Marguerite Poland, offered invaluable support.[1] Her sensitivity to the tensions that inform the fabric of life in rural Eastern Cape had been a source of inspiration to the collective for many years. Marguerite’s writing is testament not only to her genius as a writer, but to her position as a thinker and poet deeply embedded in the cosmology, language and environment of the Eastern Cape. In a moving, beautifully written prose piece for KAP at this difficult time, she endorsed our undertaking of the ‘resilience tapestry.’ ‘To imagine, to create, to record, especially in moments of uncertainty and fear, is an act of faith, not defeat.’

Marguerite Poland captures the starting conditions that have, over 23 years, described the premise for the making of so many of Keiskamma Art Project’s historic and iconic works. In her always sensitive communications, Marguerite consistently educated us about the importance of an integrated way of seeing, where words do not disconnect, but reconnect: human experience with the natural world, the spiritual with the everyday, and memory with the present time. During the darkest months of 2020, Marguerite shared her poetry to help us find our theme for the tapestry and to reconnect artists with an age-old remembrance of resilience and of bearing seasons. The haikus she shared with us, or ‘word images’ as she calls them, arose from years of research in the predominantly Xhosa-speaking areas of the Eastern Cape. They capture metaphors of seasonal change, ecological lore, and recurring natural cycles of birth and death. We were inspired by the spirit of her poetry, and chose to stitch some of them, about bird lore, cattle, nature and the seasons, into what we ultimately called our Covid Resilience Tapestry,[2] an artwork made in response to having no income, nor knowledge of how long the pandemic would last, nor of its long-term impact. The tapestry became about feeling, about the emotional seasons the artists were living through.

Slowly, a basic structure emerged as a backdrop to the existential and practical challenges of life during Covid-19. I showed artists an image of Gustav Klimt’ 1905 painting, The Tree of Life, Stoclet Frieze, which offered the inspiration to depict a tree regarded as sacred in the African context. So, the indigenous umkhiwane (wild fig) took pride of place in the tapestry design.

We appointed a young artist to lead the artwork for the first time—Siyabonga Maswana. He reinterpreted all the artists’ initial drawings into final drawings for the canvas. The final illustrations were shared and disseminated among artists and embroiderers, many of whom were still working at home. Little bits of embroidery came in like puzzle pieces and, in turn, more drawings were made, often referring to the rich symbolism of various birds and Nguni cattle in Xhosa culture. The process continued for over a year.

Production Manager Cebo Mvubu introduced the idea of depicting the nineteenth century Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse and President Cyril Ramaphosa as two ‘prophets,’ whose visions for the health of the nation had had complex and questionable effects on the people of Hamburg. (The millenarian vision of the prophetess of the 1850s had encouraged the decimation of the Xhosa people’s cattle, in the belief that this act would drive the white colonists away, and the wealth of the Xhosa nation would be restored.) The Covid Resilience Tapestry became like a large camera shutter, left open for a very long exposure, to capture life in Hamburg adapting to the pandemic. It involved processes of shifting, pinning, observation and integrating, with very little fore-planned—as how could we? This is a tapestry that was lived with, a dynamically evolving canvas that for many artists became their source of ‘our daily bread,’ the name of the original crowd-funding campaign.

At the end of 2020, while making the Covid Resilience Tapestry, we had to relinquish administrative roles in art that could no longer be justified, hence cutting the team down to only producers of tangible value, in order to survive one more year. Terminating contracts of permanent staff was an exceptionally difficult decision, yet resistance was not the response. On the contrary, the women who were affected expressed understanding; there are periods of plenty, and periods of struggle but seasons also eventually turn. The resilience Marguerite describes in the prose piece she wrote for us is moving and real.

I was reminded of a poem Mongane Wally Serote wrote for Don Mattera, a fellow poet who was banned between 1973 and 1982 by the apartheid government. The poetic imagery is of nature but of course the metaphors are deeply political, and still apposite. He writes:

it is a dry white season
dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently
headed for the earth
not even bleeding.

it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, their branches dry like wire,
indeed, it is a dry white season
but seasons come to pass.

Working in Hamburg one is reminded that, despite the end of apartheid, there are new and connected struggles today. At times a passive acceptance of fate arises—not fighting, not getting up, not feeling the value in having a voice. And this is where art and the making of a tapestry is incredible in every respect. I like to believe that the making of a tapestry comes with a strongly prophetic power due to the work of imagining. In braving the imagining of an alternative present—as we did in the case of the Covid Resilience Tapestry—the groundwork, or rather stitch work, is laid for these possibilities to come to fruition.

We imagined a resilient future, beyond the pandemic, one not premised on isolation. Certainly, technology could revolutionise our rural working environment to this end. We began to envisage how, even in the remote village of Hamburg and surrounding areas, people could live productive, connected and progressive lives. They could overcome some of the obstacles posed by geographical distance through communication and connection and so gain a sense, not only of their ‘place in the world,’ but of a ‘shared humanity.’ This was a long-term motivation of the founder of Keiskamma Art Project and the Keiskamma Trust, Carol Hofmeyr.

Technology revolutionised our rural working environment during Covid-19, foreshadowing an important request for further connection when our iconic Umlibo tapestry was completed in 2023. At the start of that year we commenced an epic undertaking with WWF, the World Wide Fund for Nature, who were already working in the vicinity of Hamburg. Their restoration projects with fish, mussels and oysters, while working with coastal communities, were proving challenging. They were hoping for their message of climate change to sink in, and to find a project that could serve as a means for communicating this vital science. Their greatest struggle was how to advocate for marginal societies at a policy level and to reach those in power about the true effects of the climate crisis. When Craig Smith (the marine portfolio senior manager at WWF and driver of the making of Umlibo) visited our studios in Hamburg, it was the Covid Resilience Tapestry, lying flat on the ground, that he saw first. He walked its 7.5 metre length excitedly, saying, ‘This is exactly what we are looking for!’

The Umlibo tapestry also works with scenarios, reimagining the current reality in terms of possible futures. WWF were ambitious in also wanting a documentary and original soundtrack—what they called a symphony. We managed at least a soundtrack! All the parts came together beautifully and timeously in two local Hamburg launches of the artwork and one in Cape Town. The morning after the Cape Town launch we took down the tapestry and packed it into a travel suitcase that went with a member of WWF that very afternoon to Dubai, just in time for the COP28 climate summit.

Watch the Umlibo documentary here.

Watch a short film of the Hamburg launches here.

A week later, Veronica Betani flew to COP28 to represent us at the South African pavilion, where Umlibo took centre stage. No one realised that she would have to entertain delegates, diplomats and heads of state from around the world every day for over a week. She was doing extraordinary work. In fact, she blew us all away. On a hot Friday afternoon in bustling Gqeberha, while piling a trolley high with watermelons for our end of year meetings, I received pictures via WhatsApp of Veronica as our KAP representative looking stunning next to President Cyril Ramaphosa, with our Umlibo climate change advocacy tapestry behind her. Then came the videos, of the president’s passionate response to Umlibo and of Veronica’s own address.

Cyril Ramaphosa asked her, ‘If we could do one thing for a community like yours, what would it be?’ Echoing what we first imagined during Covid-19, that technology might help us develop and mitigate against isolation, she answered, ‘The internet. Build us towers, so that we can have reception, so our people can all have network.’

The President used his experience of Umlibo and of meeting Veronica as the start of his official presidential communication, introducing his plans for a just energy transition. We had met the biggest challenge set by WWF—namely, to reach those with real power, and for them to understand the impact of climate change on marginalised communities. As per the President’s official communication:

Dear Fellow South Africans,

We have just returned from the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, known as COP28, where important decisions taken so far will affect the future of our planet.

The discussions at COP28 have significant implications for our country and people. The impact of climate change is a measurable reality in South Africa, with poor, rural communities in particular bearing the brunt.

While in Dubai, I visited the South Africa pavilion, where I was shown a striking artwork called the Umlibo Tapestry. It was made by a group of rural women from Hamburg in the Eastern Cape. Woven in the tapestry are images that tell a story of the impact of climate change on rural coastal communities in the province struggling with extreme weather patterns, declining fish stocks and constrained livelihoods.

The Umlibo Tapestry communicates the urgent and personal impact of climate change on one particular community. There are hundreds, thousands and millions more communities, in South Africa, on the African continent and across the Global South who are being negatively affected by climate-change induced extreme weather.

A central part of South Africa’s response to this crisis is the Just Energy Transition (JET) Investment Plan 2023–2027, which outlines the actions we need to take and the investments that we need to make to meet our climate targets.

Today a large part of my own role in leadership is hearing what each of our artists and embroiderers need, and working to create the architecture in which they can achieve their own dreams. This is exceptionally challenging as one is up against complex systems—governmental, economic, historical, cultural, organisational—each with their own entanglements, inherent fears and challenges. So the wheels turns slowly. Our focus since 2020 has nevertheless been on our beneficiary community, driven by an indicator of change described simply in terms of how much an embroiderer is earning per month, and how many embroiderers are working. In 2020 the average income of an embroiderer was R500 per month. In the closing months of 2023, that average had shifted to R5000 per month—a tenfold increase.

With a model of sustainability becoming a reality, we are starting to connect, communicate and invest in new networks, which is heartening. Our founder’s ethos has always been openness: to making mistakes, to learning, to growing, and to ensuring that people come first. The integrity of our process we define in terms of our theory of change, which is, quite simply, a description of how we create change in the lives of our beneficiaries. In the making of an iconic work, especially, this process includes: 1. Education; 2. Community engagement; 3. An open and collaborative production process; 4. Remuneration; and at the end of last year we added, 5. Advocacy. Veronica Betani affirmed this vital component. For her to be able to identify the one thing (internet connectivity) that would empower not only herself, but her entire community, is testament to the fact that as someone grows in their own agency, freedoms and confidence—not only economically—so they enable others. This is how ubuntu should work.

It’s reassuring to think there was power and foresight in Cebo Mvubu’s idea of stitching the portrait of Cyril Ramaphosa into the Covid Resilience Tapestry next to the young Xhosa prophetess, Nonqawuse. Four years later, through Umlibo, Veronica Betani is influencing our president’s vision and thinking.

We will see if Umlibo reaches the Union Buildings as the President suggested. In the meantime, Marguerite Poland is correct in so eloquently contextualising an ethos of resilience. This did not begin in 2020 with Covid-19. This is a drive built into the culture of survival, of interdependent lives lived close to nature and close to each other. With the growing potential for expression that is transformative—through art—this is a drive that will not desist.

Bibliography

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press, 1999.

[1] I met Marguerite briefly at her book launch of Abundant Herds (2003) and her inscription in my copy of the book said, ‘Follow your shades,’ advice that changed the course of my life.

[2] In March 2024 the Covid Resilience Tapestry was purchased by Australian philanthropist, businesswoman and art collector, Judith Neilson, for the Judith Neilson Foundation in Sydney, Australia.