A Feral Commons: Johannesburg

︎Aferalcommons

Io Makandal |Commission public sculpture at Victoria Yards as part of the Global Co-commission under the curatorial theme A Feral Commons curated by Tairone Bastien.

Ophidian’s Promise, public sculpture
2024-ongoing

A Feral Commons is a Global Co Commission public art project spearheaded by the Global Cultural Districts Network (GCDN), and led by Dubai-based Alserkal Advisory. Joint project partners are Kingston Creative in Kingston, Jamaica and Victoria Yards in Johannesburg, South Africa. The project is supported by Urban Art Projects, who are implementing tools to gauge the carbon footprint of the project.

Under the title A Feral Commons, the curatorial theme proposes an alternative vision of the commons, which is usually defined as land or resources shared by all people within a community. Instead, this project invites artists to illuminate human and non-human entanglements and explore a more radical understanding of what the commons could mean in a multi-species world. The theme draws upon vi-sionary American anthropologist Anna Tsing’s scholarship and writing on open-ended inter-species gatherings and non-human participants in human projects that are described as feral because they participate independently, resisting human control.

Ophidian’s Promise is a public artwork comprising of an urban wildlife eco-duct and a moss wall text. The eco-duct is built with historical clay bricks sourced from the area to make a holding space for the soil and endangered Soweto highveld biome grasses and plants that create the safe passage for urban wildlife over the Jukskei river culvert.

The sculpture references the form of a snake as the symbolic more-than-human guardian of rivers. This artistic gesture invites the human back into relationship with the waterbody and its surrounding life forms to encourage civic care over this precarious water source in a time of anthropocentric climate change.

The ground making project as the first eco-duct in Johannesburg, sets out to foreground urban ecologies and wildlife as an integral part of the urbanity that depends upon it.