Rhoda Davids Abel’s artistic approach unfolds as a field investigation aiming to gather testimonies from the political and social heritage of South Africa’s rural area of Swartland. It is a research practice on uses, rituals, stories, traditions and traumas – transmitted or silenced – within the communities of her native region. Rhoda Davids Abel’s work is a poetic translation of multiple narratives through the mediums of writing and video essay. Often contemplative, her installations require an intentional slowing down, an active listening and attentiveness which allow to unearth the layers of the works’ composition. Her research decrypts memories and pursues rumors in order to extract the evidence of witnessed atrocities. The gathered testimonies from both a population and its territory are methodologically processed into an artistic archive.
Her textual and filmic works interweave discourses and temporalities, repositioning individual stories on a map of collective trajectories. From anecdotes, adages or everyday objects, Rhoda Davids Abel takes hold of the ordinary to restore the immensity of committed violence. Calling upon a diversity of voices that emerge simultaneously from the past and the future, she imagines a restorative, healing and poetic proposal for the present.
It will cost us/you standing in the waters, presented at Kunsthalle Palazzo, is a textual and filmic poem, a manifestation of poeïsis.
All at once tree, root and flower, the protea embodies a versatile and cyclical character. Genuine shape-shifter, it is one of the oldest flowers still alive and it could easily be confused with an otherworldly xeno-alien-bud. Blooming in the winter, it thrives in poor soils and dry summers.
Some say that the protea is born again in fire.
It is offered as a companion on the road to afterlife.
In Rhoda Davids Abel’s work, proteas are bold enough to accept inevitable changes. In a landscape filled with fires and flowers, generic texts from warning plates slowly emerge to bear witness of an omnipresent and normalized violence – questioning the unquestionable value of life.
Ancestors summon to turn back. To return, or to turn back – to look back, to look backwards.
It will cost us/you standing in the waters expresses the vital coexistence of hope and remembrance. Rhoda Davids Abel writes her claim for a livable space between brutality and joy, as proteas die, remain and will live again, through the fire.
Translation: Plattform team
Photo credits: Guadalupe Ruiz