About the Orange River Project

The Orange River Project is an ongoing research project tracing the Orange River in South Africa from its source in the Lesotho Highlands to its mouth at Alexander Bay on the Atlantic coast. In the first iteration of the Orange River Project, practitioners Nina Barnett, Dee Marco, Sinethemba Twalo and Amy Watson trace the Orange River in its evolving spatio-temporal formations from the largest water storage facility in the Southern Hemisphere, the Gariep Dam in the Karoo, to Alexander Bay, where the river mouth feeds the Atlantic Ocean.

Undertaking research exploring the changing ecology of the Orange River and its surrounding regions in, on and alongside the river, the project considers the environmental, socio-political and economic factors that have shaped the river and the regions that it flows through. Both journey and research observe the impact of human activity on the river and the greater environment, through a reading of the river itself as an agent. The participants consider the history and mythos of the Orange River including historic water agreements in place and infrastructural and mining projects undertaken by the apartheid government in attempting to control and harness the river. Thinking through, the river The Orange River Project documents the changing form of the Orange River and the activities that take place within and alongside it and those who rely on it, in order to realise a collaborative transdiscipline response to the multiple and intersecting currents that produce the river as medium.

What follows are nine diary entries from a field trip along the Orange River in November 2022; the entries combine prose, poetry, photography and video as a means to document the artists' material observations and personal responses to the region's diverse and rapidly changing environment. 

Field Diaries

1. Elemental

By Amy Watson

Wednesday, 9th November 2022

At the Gariep Dam, a concrete wall has been constructed across the Orange River, flooding the desert landscape. Here, the cycling elemental forces that constitute the river are manifest. The dam wall was engineered to exploit the massive hydro-energy of the river. As the water funnels through the wall it combines with air to produce a fine water vapour that shrouds the valley producing a water saturated micro-climate within the arid semi-desert region. The vapour refracts and reflects light, each water droplet disperses light and reflects it back separating into its component wavelengths producing an arced colour spectrum. There are spectrum arcs across documentation of our time at the dams and falls of the river. We experienced unanticipated cloud formations and rainfall directly over the Gariep Dam. Further downstream we witnessed this again at the Vanderkloof Dam - engineered bodies of water producing micro-climates of their own. The river in elemental atmospherics has a visceral immediacy.

Thursday, 17 November 2022

On the outskirts of Port Nolloth is a dry salt pan. At one edge, a ring of car tyres demarcates what appears to be a place of gathering. The pan itself is marked with recent tyre tracks. In the middle of the pan, we find clusters of gypsum rock, a chalky mineral formation that traps water in its crystalline lattice. These crystals are interspersed with salt, which supports a latent seasonal brine ecosystem that sustains the possibility of some biological life. Halophilic microorganisms can withstand hypersaline environments, this resilience and survival in arid and salt saturated environs models a possible future in extreme conditions.

Tuesday, 15 November 2022

We have brought with us a windsock which affords us a measure of wind speed and direction, an instrument detecting and rendering information that might otherwise go unseen or unnoticed. As an instrument it lends itself to signal a research expedition and offers our party the cover of being natural scientists undertaking empirical research in Alexander Bay. Diamond mines, an industry that deploys water intensive processes, remain active on the last stretch of the river and beaches surrounding the mouth, mining alluvial diamonds washed downstream from the Kimberley Diamond Area millions of years ago when the river basin was larger. 

Here the river forms a border with Namibia, and the mouth supports a wetland and estuary under conservation, before flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. The river is plagued by conflicted mining, conservation and agricultural interests most apparent at, and nearing, it’s mouth.

2. River in Three

By Amy Watson

Saturday, 12 November 2022

At Keimoes the Orange River splits into three, its riverine fingers extend formally into signposted Orange 1, Orange 2 and Orange 3. Tracing a map of the river the Orange creates a fertile inland archipelago for long stretches in the otherwise arid semi-desert Northern Cape. The river's reach is extended by arterial water canals which supply the desert town and surrounding areas with irrigation for grapes, peaches, cotton, lucern and date farming.

Upstream, near the town of Douglas, the Vaal River forms a tributary with the Orange, the two great rivers’ sediments and velocities meeting. We track this co-joining by floating an object which is choreographed by the converging currents. At the community managed lookout point there are dry toilets with no running municipal water - meters away from the two most substantive rivers in South Africa. At Keimoes the river as many is formally signed at each bridge over the Orange. The bridges necessitate the signage to differentiate one from another, for the river in excess and its contractions are materially evident throughout its trajectory. Consistent is the river's mutability, its changing constitution, course and flow, and that it is always multiple.

3. The Shoal

By Dee Marco

Monday, 14 November 2022

In the fifteenth century, for those who did not enter (or leave from) the arched threshold of the Door of No Return, sandbanks and shoals were the last spots of sand that an African embarking the slave vessel stepped on be- fore being carried into the hold. The shoal was also a place just off the coast of the archipelagos of the Caribbean and the ports of the British Carolinas where the enslaved Africans arrived in the New World and took their first wobbly steps on a small bar of sand, where they stumbled forward, slipped, or crashed and were made to stand before wading into a shorter stretch of water that would finally bring them to the shore—a place where an adult could hoist a child higher on a hip to get a better grasp before wading to shore; a place that caused unsteady sea legs to slip beneath themselves into a tumble and tangle of coffles and iron banging together. 

In Alexander Bay the group explore a kind of ‘post-apocalyptic landscape’, so described by Nina in text messages to Dee on the group. The image is a reminder of past- and post- lives, and iterations of both on the shoal. 

-  The Black Shoals (Tiffany Lethabo King, 2019, p. 9)

Water Bobbing: Surface and Below

Tuesday 15 November, 2022 

Dear friends 

I've just had a look at the images Nina sent - the word haunting strikes me as fitting... and true. Sinethemba, you standing there alone, in the wind, watching this water on the one side and these structures in the distance - weird. 

Hauntology came to mind immediately. 

And there's so much to say about this in relation to the kind of work we are thinking through and that you're all so physically immersed in at this point of the trip. 

I am sure you're all so tired by now... that even though in conversation with the water, you're also constantly recalibrating your energies, vibrations and abilities to be present while, i'm sure, also thinking about home in interesting ways. 

Four collaborators went on a trip down the Orange River in November 2022. One stayed behind for personal reasons – this excerpt is taken from a letter written by Dee Marco, addressed to the three on the trip: Nina Barnett, Amy Watson and Sinethemba Twalo. ‘Haunting’ was a theme for all four on the team as we were all so profoundly haunted by water that week and by the trip in fascinating, beautiful and scary ways. The images here show immersion in water - river water in all of them. Two show the making of paper (seen here as pulp)  with the river water as a way of partaking in the trip, its flows and its promise.

4. Containment (holding water)

By Nina Barnett

Gariep Dam

Friday, 11 November 2022

When a river is dammed, it becomes unlike itself. The flow is made still, its edges unfamiliar territory. Flooding the desert landscape in the 1960’s was an act of erasure and the claiming of water-space over land. Karoo koppies (small hills) became islands, named “Manhattan” and “Christmas” (among others). The making of islands is also an act of containment - the hills that were once ancestral homes becoming terminally separated, only accessible to those with the means to sail. Water recreation plays a part in holding the borders - limiting access to the shoreline through economies of pleasure. 

So much of containment through damming requires constant monitoring. The force of the water held in place is extreme, small variations in the dam wall that go unchecked can compromise the structure, a fracturing or falling of the barrier would mean the flooding and destruction of farms, land and towns across the country's interior, towards the sea. Though the dam wall appears robust, there are indications of fragility – a submerged marker notes the surface level of the dammed water, a hilltop watchtower observes the wall through large windows, the security guard mentions experts that will arrive to measure millimeter shifts in the concrete.

Riemvasmaak

Sunday, 13 November 2022

A little north of Kakamas is the dry Malope riverbed. A tributary of the Orange River, the Malope river is said to flow once every twenty years. Deep in the valley carved out by the river is a secreted warm stream, a hot spring. This place is called Riemvasmaak - meaning “tightening the straps” - a nod to containment, and also survival. Birds trace the (imagined) movement of the water in the air, catching the wind through the valley. Their calls echo off the rock walls, the sound is held tight and pushed through. The valley is a vessel, both empty and full.

5. Saturation

By Nina Barnett

9-18 November 2022

“Being able to say, “this saturates that” or “this precipitates out of that” is the start of generating theoretical approaches that are sensitive to the flux and flow of matter on the move” Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz Saturation - An Elemental Politics (2021)

As we followed the flow of the river from the Gariep dam to Alexander bay, we looked for signs of present and past flow, of soaking and drying out, of seepage and evaporation. The movement of water is most noticeable in the visible body of the river coursing from source to mouth, but there are other, subtler effects of the wet and the arid, of water in transition. 

6. Extraction

By Sinethemba Twalo

15-18 November 2022

“And so castles made of sand slip into the sea easily”. 
Desire, my litany of contradictions. 
A lonely desertscape, an angry sea.  I think of our encounter as an assembly of unfulfilled compulsions. This estrangement, a quandary that belies appearance. Desire, my anxious choreography. The issue at hand may be, by way of, in spite of
(the negation)
the chorus
the repetition
To Shore…A frontline

As one travels the arid coastal and desert region of the Richtersveld, you are confronted by the unsettling confluence of myriad, contradicting interests in the area. The chaotic imbrication of the everyday with issues of land dispossession, capitalist accumulation and various extractive processes -along the Orange river and it’s mouth - has “intimately disorganized” communities (and by implication: socialities; becomings; other life-worlds; more-than-human elements).  Since annexation of the region by the British colonial government in 1847 - to extend the frontier of the Cape colony – the question of violence has been intimately tied to multiple relations and processes. As we travel alongside the Orange - attempting to comprehend the temperaments of a fugacious landscape - a strange and overwhelming otherness beleaguers one. I attempt to feel for the thing, hoping to mutate with, inhabit, become more fluid and otherwise, to dissolve yet again.