The conversations we are shaping include how we might best address water, energy and food insecurity; systematic injustices and the uneven distribution of resources; and impacts of climate change on the availability of and access to sufficient, reliable and safe water, energy and food. The artwork on display – videos, sculptures, photography and drawing - will include contributions from community artists and other artists in Makhanda and Johannesburg; we will also include performances at the opening reception. The exhibition will also feature archaeological and ethnographic material from the Origins Centre collection.

Prior to the conference, artists will be working on a mural outside the Centre, and the opening session and reception will celebrate their work. While details will follow, the programme at this stage is as follows:

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Venue Info

Origins Centre, University of Witwatersrand

Coming by car:

You will need to get through Wits security, please bring ID and let them know you are coming to Origins Centre. The closest entrance to us is on Yale Rd, cnr Enoch Sontonga, but you can also enter on Yale Rd off Empire Rd. There is a parking lot in front of Origins Centre for visitors to park. Contact us for more information on parking.

Coming by Uber

Please bring your ID. The best entrance to come through is Sutton Close (opposite Eendraght Str) on Jorissen Rd, about 100 m down from Origins Centre. Uber address: Jorissen St & Eendracht Str.

Agitation

is a conference and exhibition, convened and curated by members of Eco-Imagining, a collaborative research project, and the Origins Centre, University of the Witwatersrand.

Agitation as a conference opens at 14:00 on Wednesday 1 October and closes with lunch on Friday 3 October. Over these days, we will consider food, water and energy insecurities, NGO interventions and their successes, limits and challenges, rights to food, water and energy, and ways to address difficulties in realising these rights.

Climate change is a major systems-level agitation, disrupting everyday life at multiple levels. The conference title Agitation was selected to highlight dramatic environmental changes which we are experiencing, and their impact on the availability of and access to key resources, particularly of water, energy, and food. At the same time, Agitation is a call for responsive and responsible action. The uncertainty of climate, basic services and resources, lives and livelihoods all ask us to take seriously our moral responsibility to the planet and each other. The ways in which unpredictability impacts unevenly, widening inequality, places an even heavier obligation on scientists and civil actors alike.   

The conference is paired with an exhibition, also Agitation, on full display until 10 October. A mural guides participants to the exhibition and conference venue. Within the Origins Centre, we include drawings, prints, sculptures, videos, banners, and posters developed by researchers, community artists and others in Durban, Mdantsane (Eastern Cape), Mankweng (Limpopo) and Johannesburg. These works are displayed along with artworks from Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee and Christine Dixie, both of whom have collaborated with the researchers. All these works converse with and sometimes contradict archaeological, material culture and ethnographic objects. These objects enhance our engagement with questions of resource scarcity, complexity, deep history, and loss.

Eco-Imagining, formally entitled Ecological Community Engagements: Imagining Sustainability and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Urban South African Environments, is led by Lenore Manderson at University of the Witwatersrand and Eileen Moyer at University of Amsterdam, was funded by the NRF and the Dutch Research Foundation (NWO) as part of a special initiative on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. The project also includes colleagues from the University of Fort Hare, University of Limpopo, and Rhodes University, together with non-government organisations RULIV, Gender CC, The People’s Pantry, and Maker’s Valley, and for Agitation, with the Origins Centre. Participants include stakeholders from various government departments and specific entities, from non-profit organisations, and other civil society actors, whose policies and program interests extend across the fields of interest of water, energy and food, and around poverty, its alleviation, inequality, and resistance.  

We look forward to your participation!

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The WEF Nexus – interconnections between water, energy and food – has largely been the subject of research attention in relation to policy, governance and intersectoral engagement. In South Africa, and globally, researchers have concentrated on technical and technocratic questions, emphasising the quantification of resources. Communities, livelihoods and local environments have rarely figured in this work, whether due to perceived irrelevance, lack of interest, or by being ignored. The WEF Nexus approach makes certain assumptions about the nature of the state – it is seen as an instrument of delivery, and delivery failures are seen as lapses of coordination and communication, rather than as outcomes of struggles over power and resources. WEF Nexus also often fails to account for, let alone foreground, questions of the environment and land, including struggles of control over and access to land as central to WEF resource security. Hence the need to understand WEF outcomes as part of a broader political economy. Eco-Imagining engages with this technocratic literature from the point of view of people’s lived reality, to challenge and enrich existing frameworks. Using a transdisciplinary approach, and inclusive and community-based approaches, we examine issues around water, energy and food security, and changes in these domains that people experience in the context of social, economic, environmental and climate change. Juxtaposition and Value brings together environmental and biological scientists, humanities scholars and the creative arts.

The exhibition and colloquium reflects our concern with inequality and insecurity, now and historically, as these affect access to water, food, energy, and other resources such as land. In the exhibition of our own work, and the photographs, prints and other art work, and the ethnographic items we have selected, we juxtapose images, compare and contrast; through this approach, we draw attention to the differences in values between communities and the state. The methods we have used in the projects highlight our approach to knowledge production, raising questions too in terms of how values determine the direction of policies and programmes related to basic resources. The exhibited material includes expressive and representational media by professional and community artists and by people in their everyday lives – painting, printing, drawing, photography, video, sound, and domestic objects. We include posters of two doctoral research projects which provide examples of juxtaposition, and the lack of value given to equity when people lack resources. We include also community artwork from another doctoral projects.