CHRIS THURMAN: The preciousness and precariousness of water

The drought in Europe has brought river and dam levels to almost unprecedented lows, revealing a variety of previously submerged curiosities. These include archaeologically significant treasures, such as the Dolmen of Guadalperal (the “Spanish Stonehenge”) as well as bridges, fortresses, weapons and clothing items dating to the Roman Empire.

Many of the discoveries have more sombre overtones. The portentously named “hunger stones” along rivers in Germany and the Czech Republic bear inscriptions from those who have lived through periods of drought in centuries past. More recent historical markers also emerged: an enormous undetonated bomb dropped by Allied forces into Italy’s Po River during World War 2, and a fleet of Nazi warships scuttled in the Danube in Serbia.

As one meme-maker wearily put it: a more subtle metaphor would have sufficed to demonstrate the severity of the climate crisis.

But would it? Dramatic photographs of these phenomena may cause a moment of concern — as other forms of news coverage do — but they have not stopped Europeans from going about their summer as they usually would.

In SA, we know all about water scarcity. Yet we too are quick to turn a blind eye to stories of daily water shortages in the Eastern Cape and of taps running dry in municipalities across the country. Even in the Western Cape, just a few years after Day Zero loomed large, people have very short memories.

Award-winning filmmaker Victor van Aswegen, who has produced 51 hours of film for the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative, affirms that the greatest challenge he faces is to drive home to viewers the urgency and severity of water scarcity as a global threat.

Readers of recent columns may recall me mentioning Van Aswegen’s film Sculpting this Earth, which enjoyed its world premiere last weekend at the Solo Studios festival in Riebeek Kasteel. The film documents the practice and philosophy of land artist Strijdom van der Merwe, tracking his work through a seasonal cycle in varied landscapes, from the Cape winelands to the Tankwa Karoo.

While they make a virtue of the desert as a canvas, celebrating its stark beauty, Van der Merwe’s art and Van Aswegen’s film also remind us of the necessary balance between such sparse environments and lush, fertile ground. The natural world is robust, diverse, abundant, but it is not infinitely resilient — not if, by resilient, we mean capable of continuing to sustain humanity. 

I was not surprised when Kathy Robins told me that Van der Merwe’s work is a key point of reference for her own creative output. Robins’ art is, as she puts it, “born out of conversations with nature”: she seeks to map out “a mode of relating to the natural world that involves gentle listening and intimate connecting rather than domination”. And in her new body of work, Re-turn, she is specifically preoccupied with the preciousness and precariousness of water.

Leading a walkabout of her exhibition at Creation Wines in the Hemel en Aarde Valley, Robins enthusiastically pointed out the vessels she has crafted that, whether the dams are full or empty, signal the need to catch and contain as many drops of rain as possible. A larger-scale work like Fog Catcher, installed for illustrative and symbolic rather than practical purposes, gestures towards the innovation required to harvest water from alternative sources.

Other works capture something of the inadequacy of our former and current methods of managing water: mangled water boilers and the Water Towers series show the “contradictory nature” of copper, yielding to oxidation but also — recycled and upcycled as a “scrappy yet purposeful” material — simultaneous evidence of socioeconomic disparities and of “strategies of survival” that will become increasingly necessary in the anthropocene age.

Extinctions of one form or another nevertheless seem inevitable, as Robins’ Future Fossils sculptures suggest. These ambiguous forms are “caught between the past and the future”, prehistoric but also issuing warnings about prospective “ecological self-destruction”.

Happily, all is not lost. Not yet. The fossils have their miniature counterparts in the Guardians series. These small, talismanic objects draw on the golem of Jewish folklore and become receptacles of a different kind: they hold “human hopes, aspirations and fears” and accompany travellers seeking “a place of refuge from the world in crisis”.