Frondescent is the name of Io Makandal’s third solo exhibition with Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg. The exhibition, shown in two adjoining rooms of the Parkhurst gallery, comprises a floating assemblage of disembodied foliage and large-printed textiles as well as a series of paintings from Makandal’s recent artist residency at Nirox Sculpture Park in the Cradle of Humankind. The works are painted in oil and acrylic onto plywood canvases and sheets of cotton archival paper, floated a few centimetres from the gallery walls. Makandal notes that this is the first time she has worked formally with the medium of painting for an exhibition. The paintings comprise vibrantly colourful abstract marks in different registers of density and tonality.Frondescence is the name given to new, unfolding leaves. In an email correspondence, Makandal reflects on the paintings as a meditation on frondescence “as the new leaves, saplings, sores emerge and the fecund potential that exists there.” She also makes reference to the deep orange plastic blades of hand-held grass cutting machines, which I speculate she witnessed in use at Nirox Sculpture Park during her residency there. These paintings are marked by crude red lines across colourful surfaces and are, according to the artist – a self-described eco-feminist – intended as a “trace of the practice of conditioning nature and constructing landscape.” I am interested in the reference to orange plastic blades as nature-conditioning agents for constructing landscapes (for which Makandal does not give further context); I also enjoy the image of new leaves unfurling. However, I find myself looking for a local context to which I might apply Makandal’s expressive vocabulary. I move onto the assemblage, my favourite work on show, which includes printed images of the amaranth plant found in and around the city, for further insight into the eco-feminist artist’s “conversations with terra.”1

Installed diagonally across the far-left corner of the second adjoining exhibition room, the assemblage comprises three printed textile pieces and a floating menagerie of disembodied green foliage. The front-most textile piece (if one is facing the assemblage from the entrance of the gallery room) is a 1.5 x 2 meter chiffon landscape suspended from what appears to be fishing gut, attached by its top two corners. Behind this, another chiffon textile print, raised slightly higher than the first, is suspended at different tensions from its two corners. The difference in tension between the two suspension points – one taut and one slack – insinuate the form of a body beckoning to elsewhere. The third textile piece is printed on cotton mull and hangs heavily from one of its corners like a sharp, opaque column behind the two chiffon prints.

The images printed onto the textiles are Makandal’s cinematic photographs of the amaranth weedy plant in rich hues of greens and purples (it is not specified whether the amaranth of these images are indigenous or not). She found the amaranth plants growing on the roadside of Malibongwe Drive and in a ‘dump’ behind Egoli Gas works. Three different species of floating tropical plant cuttings complete the image; they are suspended at different heights and depths in relation to the textile prints. The offcuts, all collected from the artist’s personal garden, consist of a split-leaf philodendron leaf (delicious monster relative), strelitzia leaf (of the banana tree) and two lace fern tendrils. Two fans are positioned on the floor at opposing angles to the work, whirring and stirring movement from below. Due to a range in density and form, each moving part in the assemblage has its own spatial choreography-in-motion. I enjoy the scene of the dancing chiffon landscape on which the strelitzia leaf bobs and spins on its awkward axis. The two fronds, one positioned above and the other alongside the landscape, shimmy and twirl, occasionally reaching out for a touch. The delicious monster leaf, suspended on its side, remains quite undeterred by the fans, solemnly playing its part as anchor to the image as a whole, keeping the assemblage in a wonderfully playful harmony.

I would like to turn my attention to the camera Makandal uses to capture what she calls the “liminal green spaces in the city.” The photographic camera is what eco-feminist author Donna Haraway would describe as a ‘prosthetic device’ of “modern, technological science.” In her essay, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988), the photographic image comes under scrutiny as a mechanism of the “god-trick” of western science, which often does not account for the actual human subject who captures the image. The photographic image, therefore, offers a translation of the world through the simulated lens of the camera’s eye, presenting the final image as seemingly the view from a body-less eye. In her doctrine for an embodied, ‘feminist objectivity,’, Haraway argues for a practice of accountability that situates the source of knowledge at the site of the body of the author and, “allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.”2In this vein, I would like to know more about the amaranth plant – the image of which is cropped and isolated from its surroundings in Makandal’s photographic textile prints.

Amaranth is a highly nutritional weedy plant, of which there are both native and non-indigenous species. Its leaves are commonly prepared as a spinach dish in South African homes. As a weedy species, it can grow in hardier ecological settings, such as cracks in the sidewalks and the ‘dump sites’ of Makandal’s photographs, taken in and around Johannesburg.

The artist side-notes that the “liminal green spaces” of her photographs can also be referred to as “third landscapes,” with which she demonstrates the adaptive and resilient qualities of plants despite the city’s constant infrastructural reconfigurations under capitalist venture. The ‘Third Landscape’ is credited to a manifesto by French architect, Gilles Cleménts, which he describes as “a territory for the many species that cannot find a place elsewhere…located on the margins…in the forgotten corners of cultivation where machines do not pass.” In light of my personal research on the amaranth plant as a nutritional food source, I am curious as to why the artist chose to decontextualise the plant from its ecological setting, as it is clearly an actant within a multi-species landscape, in which the human species must certainly participate.

I think of Bettina Malcomess’ use of the term ‘uitvalgrond’ from her and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt’s co-written book, Not no Place. Johannesburg. Space and Fragments of Time (2013). Uitvalgrond roughly translates to ‘surplus ground’ and is applied by Malcomess to the marginal sites in and around Johannesburg’s shifting infrastructure. “These seemingly ‘natural’ interstices within the urban and suburban fabric of the city are not necessarily unoccupied or unused – often the space is the territory of informal traders, trash collectors, the city’s indignant or homeless, or a pathway between industry and a settlement.” I am left to wonder why Makandal does not explicitly reference the existing discourses, which describe – both in theory and practice – the same sites she engages in her work.

Further, I would hope that an eco-feminist’s “conversations with terra” would consider the specific terroir of the region of their research – a winemaking term used to describe how the character of the soil gives flavour to grape crops. A region’s terroir is influenced by factors of natural environment, ecological interactions and human activity over time. The errant amaranth crops, likewise, do not grow in isolation of their environment. Yet, it appears that Makandal has selected and isolated fragments of a Third Landscape, such as grass cutter blades and errant urban plant life, to stand in for the whole multi-species assemblages, which find refuge in the liminal green spaces of Johannesburg.

Ironically, I find that the artist’s use of the photographic image to isolate the amaranth plant could be argued to demonstrate the ways in which the photographic camera, as a prosthetic mechanism, could be used as a tool for “conditioning nature and constructing landscape.” Makandal’s nevertheless beautiful floating assemblage of zoomed-in images of the amaranth plant and disembodied foliage, accumulated from her own personal garden, present to me an idealised image of the natural world, which cannot easily be traced to any specific ecological setting, based on the body of work and accompanying texts, alone. As for the extent of the artists “conversations with terra,” at this point, I would more confidently describe them as monologues with her garden plants.