Dixie, Below the Sediments
BELOW THE SEDIMENTS: DISSECTING WATER ALIENATION IN THE SEMI-DESERT REGION OF THE KAROO, SOUTH AFRICA Christine Dixie Christine Dixie (artist, educator), Department of Fine Art, Rhodes University, P.O. Box 94, Makhanda, 6140. Email: <c.dixie@ru.ac.za>. Abstract Below the Sediments is a five paneled two layered print that visualizes the earth below the Karoo landscape, with images of pipes used for fracking superimposed on this image. In this article, the author weaves references to this work with the history of water divining in the Karoo in the nineteenth century, and contemporary references to fracking. The author questions the simplistic dichotomy constructed in the popular press, then and now, between a rational scientific epistemology and ‘irrational’ local lore. The panels illustrate these tensions. Word count: 3065
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Dixie, Below the Sediments In February 2018, the Makhanda (then Grahamstown) High Court declared that fracking in the Karoo was illegal. This historic decision occurred in response to an extensive report, The Scientific Assessment for Shale Gas Development in the Central Karoo, published in 2016 by Robert Scholes and Greg Schreiner of the University of the Witwatersrand. The report indicated that “(t)he greatest risk is that the fracking fluid leaks into the surface water and shallow aquifers used by people, livestock and the ecosystem, due to inadequate sealing of the upper parts of the borehole, or following a spill on the surface. These risks can be reduced, but not eliminated, by good engineering” [1]. Significantly, the court determined that no water was to be used in the Karoo for commercial purposes because it was a limited resource [2]. Much of the public debate on access to water in the Karoo in the late nineteenth century, and in contemporary debates around fracking, have pitted the rational and scientific against the intuitive, the irrational and the emotive. In my art, I explore the registers of language employed between these apparently opposing epistemologies, that have resulted in a fabricated dichotomy that veils other concerns. My entry into this debate comes from my artwork, Below the Sediments (Fig.1), which employs multiple registers. In this article, I weave together references to this artwork, to the history of water divining in the Karoo, and to fracking, drawing on both popular media and recent scientific research
Fig.1. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments I-V, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, each panel 56 x 120 cm, 2018. © ChristineDixie
The Karoo is an expansive semi-arid region in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, well known for its fossils of dinosaurs; there are several distinct fossils in the dry river bed across which I often walked. The traces of their ancient presence are a visible sign on the
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Dixie, Below the Sediments surface of the earth of its ancient history. Paleontologist Bruce Rubidge reflects that “(t)his is the only place in the world where such an extended fossil record of early evolution of ‘reptilian’ life is preserved in a single basin and chronicles the most distant evolutionary ancestry of mammals in remarkable detail” [5]. The landscape is stark, arid and harsh. It holds a particular metaphysical place in the imagination of the country, the setting that the author J.M. Coetzee depicts in his novel, In the Heart of the Country. Below the Sediments (2018) is an iteration of an earlier work, Even in the Long Descent (2002) [3], a series of five color etchings printed onto paper. This series was partly in response to my time spent living in Nieu-Bethesda, a small town in the Karoo, and my uncanny sense of walking upon earth that held millennia of history below the surface. In this respect, curator Karen Milbourne of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art noted: “The crisply delineated blades of grass and subtle trails of the surface give way to reveal deathly gray-blue bodies, possibly swept to the surface in a mud-slide or still buried deep below. Their unearthly presence calls to question the stories that lie dormant beneath the unblemished surface above” [4]. Right Between the Eyes <1> In the intervening years between the first iteration of my work in 2002, and the second in 2018, fracking in the Karoo emerged as if inevitable, whether or not desirable. My understanding of the issues surrounding fracking was filtered through local media accounts that appeared overwhelmingly opposed to the practice. For example, in a 2014 article in Forbes Africa, “I want a fracking future,” Matthew Norval, the Director of the Conservation Program at the Wilderness Foundation, was quoted as follows: Fracking raised its head at almost the same time we started working in that area. There is no doubt that it influenced the way we worked and the way some of the landowners decided how to collaborate with us. I think fracking hit a lot of the landowners, sort of right between the eyes. They suddenly realised that properties that had been in their families for generations were now under threat. It was possible their land would get damaged and their children or their children’s children wouldn’t be able to make a livelihood from farming. You have to bear in mind its prime natural rangeland grazing for sheep and cattle [6].
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Dixie, Below the Sediments Water Alienation and Colonization <1> The “properties that had been in their families for generations” and that are “prime natural rangeland for sheep and cattle” have a fraught history, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century and a distinct aspect of colonization. In this, access to water played a major role. Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell in their paper, “Landscape of Conquest: Frontier Water Alienation and Khoikhoi Strategies of Survival 1652-1780,” describe how: The Dutch East India Company legitimized settler occupation of Khoikhoi land by granting them exclusive use of lands they acquired in freehold or on loan. The settlers took advantage of this permissive policy and their connection to the Cape Town bureaucracy to acquire choice watered land in the interior. These lands and the water resources and pasture they contained were denied to the Khoikhoi pastoralists who found it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves in a land in which access to limited water resources were necessary for survival [7].
Fig. 2. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments IV showing a detail of the Sneeuberg mountains, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x 120 cm, 2018.© ChristineDixie
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Fig. 3. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments II showing a detail of the Sneeuberg mountains, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x120cm, 2018 .© ChristineDixie
Dixie, Below the Sediments The mountains depicted in Below the Sediments are part of the Sneeuberg mountain range in the Karoo (Fig.2, Fig.3). Into this harsh area of the escarpment, from about 1740, under the support of the VOC (Dutch East India Company), the colonial settler frontier advanced rapidly. Mohammed Adhikari writes: Farmers needed to be even more mobile in this environmental zone to exploit both summer and winter grazing to obtain year-round nourishment for their stock. To the north they came into conflict with /Xam-speaking San and along the north-eastern frontier of the Sneeuberg region, with the Swy Ei amongst others. The further colonists moved from Cape Town, the more tenuous VOC control over its subjects became and the greater the degree of lawlessness in the border regions and beyond [8]. A century later, access to water in the Karoo came to another crucial turning point with the advent of the Cape Underground Water Rush. Beginning in 1891, this marked the moment of more intensive farming by European settlers in the Karoo. Lance van Sittert notes: By the second half of the nineteenth century the lack of a dependable water supply was severely constraining the Cape Colony’s agricultural development. This dearth was particularly acute in the interior. In years of plenty, the Karoo was imagined as a promised land, a new internal frontier of white settlement; in years of drought, it was depicted as the desert graveyard of colonialism. Water was the key missing element in both the realisation of the dream and aversion of the nightmare [9]. The Windmill <1> The “realization of the dream” was achieved by drilling for underground water. Above the surface of the earth, the windmill marked the spot at which access to channels of water had been gained. As a sign, it points to mechanisms below the earth’s surface; as a symbol, it indicates territorial possession. A small detail in the landscape depicted in the fourth panel of Below the Sediments is the barely discernible, yet distinctive windmill (Fig.4). This small topographical detail marks the landscape as a sign of land that has been appropriated, occupied and under “cultivation” and so, by extension, “civilization.” The farm panorama that forms the middle ground depicts an “unpeopled” landscape with traces of “cultivation” (fences, farm roads and windmills). The
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Dixie, Below the Sediments imagery derives from the traditional depiction of the “picturesque” landscape, a painting convention imported from Europe which was used to interpret, contain and control the space in which the settlers found themselves. In his opening address to the exhibition FrontTears (1997), in which I exhibited prints and an installation which attempts to unsettle this convention, cultural historian David Bunn noted: For the white communities of the Eastern Cape, the idea of “landscape” was a key way in which the settler self accommodated itself to foreign terrain. Like its British counterpart, the South African picturesque found a way of managing contradictions inherent in violent land practices: peasant labour, prior occupation and traumatic land clearances are all effaced by an image of distant vistas that open up accommodatingly to the enlightened landowner [10].
Fig. 4. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments II showing the detail of a windmill, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x 120 cm 2018 © ChristineDixie
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Dixie, Below the Sediments In Below the Sediments the windmill remains in the distance, but now dominating the foreground, literally dissecting the image into hard grid-like spaces, are the hydraulic pipes laid below the earth’s surface to extract shale gas (Fig.5). In the fourth panel, the same panel in which the windmill is depicted, the shale gas extractor pump pushes its way through the surface of Earth’s crust, intruding into the space of the rural landscape above.
Fig. 5. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments II showing a detail of a child and fragment of a hydraulic pipe, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x 120 cm 2018. © ChristineDixie
Stirring Emotions <1> In the recent public debate on the potential effects on the Karoo environment of the proposed fracking for gas, economic imperatives were driven by a European multinational company,
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Dixie, Below the Sediments Shell, which harnessed “expert” scientists and geologists to its cause. In the public debate the economic priorities of the multinational company are pitted against a nostalgic desire by the “locals” for an “undisturbed” landscape. Here, for example in an article entitled “Karoo Fracking: Water, Wealth and Whites,” published in the Mail and Guardian in 2013: Stretching across the heart of South Africa, the Karoo has stirred emotions for centuries, a stunning semi-desert wilderness that draws artists, hunters and the toughest of farmers. It is now rousing less romantic passions. If energy companies and the ANC [11] get their way, it will soon be home to scientists and geologists mapping out shale gas fields touted as game-changers for Africa's biggest economy [12]. What is undeclared by the “artists, hunters and the toughest of farmers” is that their interest in an undisturbed landscape is also economically driven. What is underplayed by the “expert” scientists working on behalf of the foreign investors is that their research was less than rigorous, as Robert Scholes and Greg Schreiner noted: “Large volumes of gas have been claimed to be present based on sparse data, but the economically recoverable resource is much smaller” [13]. I perceive in this recent debate around fracking, as constructed in the media, an oppositional stance between the “scientific,” “European” energy companies and the “emotional” local farmers. This is a similar problematic dichotomy to that set up between “rational” science and “irrational” superstition in the late nineteenth century, the scientific, foreign, “rational” model of geology imported by the Cape Colony state to drill boreholes was juxtaposed with the “irrational” practice of water divining by local farmers. Van Sittert, in his insightful article on water divining, has argued that “the ‘crude epistemological dichotomies of the history of science should be treated with a more nuanced approach as ‘the civilising mission’ was not always confined to strictly rational models” [14]. In the contemporary debate around fracking, it was “rational” scientists such as Scholes and Shreiner who provided the carefully nuanced approach to the risks of fracking in the Karoo [15]. Specters of the Dead <1> Neither the debates between the Karoo farmers and the Shell Company now, and the farmers and state geologists in the nineteenth century, raise the specter of the dead or the unique geological and paleontological history as a concern. For me, however, there was and is a blind spot in these debates on the pros and cons of fracking. These debates do not dwell on Page 8 of 13
Dixie, Below the Sediments the history of the Karoo as both a geological phenomenon, ‘a pivotal area for the study of early “ reptile” biodiversity and evolution…” [16] and a place of tragic warfare which witnessed in the last three decades of the eighteenth century “an exterminatory military offensive against the San” [17].
Below the Sediments I-V <1> Each of the five panels of Below the Sediments I-V is made up of two large digitally printed sheets. The front sheet is printed onto brushed metal, so to evoke the history of mining for precious metals below the earth’s surface, a practice central to the Cape Colony and South Africa’s economic growth. This front sheet depicts the Karoo landscape with bodies falling/floating below the earth’s surface. In his opening address of the exhibition ‘Hide’ (2002), which took place in the Karoo town of Nieu-Bethesda and in which the first iteration of this work featured, Professor David Bunn noted: Looked at from some distance, you can see immediately that the normal scale of value in landscape is reversed: the top third of each is ordered around a gently recessional farm landscape, but the entire lower two thirds shows another perspective. Caught between the pull of these two planes, we are not sure whether the lower view is of grave stratigraphy, a bank of earth, or a pool of ox blood, in which bodies huddle, hiding eyes or genitals, or tightening into rigor mortis. The implicitly narrative landscape elements at the top are met and matched by an older, obverse universe of the body. Throughout Christine's work, from her earliest student pieces, that realm of bodily meaning has been signalled by an uncanny blue green colour, reminiscent of the Verdigris cheekbones of Grunewald's dead saints.[18] Laser cut into this front sheet are the fracking pipes and machinery, diagrammatic images I came across on the internet of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. The earth depicted in these panels has literally been cut away, an inherently aggressive process which rehearses the real-life procedures of drilling and digging.
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Dixie, Below the Sediments The second sheet holds the digitally printed image of the sea. Drawn from a still from a stopframe animation sequence, this ‘painterly’ image, has an uncanny, surreal aqua blueness. The “water” which delineates the pipes seems to refer more to the unearthly realm of the spirit than that of the underground. Although at the time, I was looking for an image that would depict the water below, in retrospect the use of the image of the sea seems serendipitous – Bruce Rubidge writes of the Karoo during the Late Carboniferous era forming a “large inland sea in which the earliest reptiles from Gondwana lived” [19]. The “pipes” and the “cracks” created through the laser cut-outs threaten to disturb the floating bodies within the image (Fig.6, Fig.7). This further dimension, both literal and metaphorical, visualizes the collision and collusion of languages of representation and is intended to reveal something of the different representational practices of art and science. In Below the Sediments the two “languages” are brought together to speak about the apprehensions that are often veiled by the emotive, romanticized language of the land used by “artists, hunters and the toughest of farmers” and the seemingly “rational” language employed by scientists.
Fig. 6. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments III, detail of hydraulic pipe, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x 120 cm 2018 © ChristineDixie
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Fig. 7. Christine Dixie, Below the Sediments IV detail of falling body and hydraulic pipe, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x 120 cm 2018 © ChristineDixie
Dixie, Below the Sediments The parallel that I discern in both the popular debates in the press in the time of the Water Rush in the nineteenth century and in the recent debate on fracking is an unacknowledged history which lies like a repressed memory. Held within the sediments of the Eastern Cape earth is a fraught history of war and exploitation. This is the history which diviners and geologists, engineers and politicians threaten to let loose like Goya’s bats, when drills for water or gas shake the earth and disturb the dead who lie for the moment fossilized below the sediments, and who if disturbed might haunt the land (Fig. 8).
Fig. 8. Below the Sediments IV, detail of the Compassberg Mountain, digital print onto brushed metal with lazer cutouts, 56 x 120 cm, 2018. © ChristineDixie
References and Notes 1. Robert Scholes and Greg Schreiner, “Unpacking the issues around fracking in South Africa.” <www.wits.ac.za/Home/News/Latest news/in their own words/2017> 2017-07, accessed 12 December 2018. 2. Jay Caboz, “No Fracking Way,” Forbes Africa, 2 February 2018. <www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/02/28/no-fracking-way-2/ > Accessed 10 December 2018.
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Dixie, Below the Sediments 3. This series of work was exhibited in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in 2012 as part of the exhibition Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa. 4.
Karen Milbourne, “Where are the bodies? Interment and the Poetics of Absence” in “Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa” (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2013), pp. 135 -137
5.
Bruce Rubidge, “The Karoo, A Geological and Paleontological Superlative: Economic Potential of Deep History,” <www.researchgate.net/publication/242120361_THE_KAROO_A_GEOLOGICAL_AN D_PALAEONTOLOGICAL_SUPERLATIVE_ECONOMIC_POTENTIAL_OF_DEEP _HISTORY>, Accessed 12 December 2018.
6.
“I Want a Fracking Future,” Forbes Africa, 1 October 2014. <www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2014/10/01/want-fracking-future/> Accessed 10 December 2018.
7.
Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell, “Landscape of Conquest: Frontier Water Alienation and Khoikhoi Strategies of Survival, 1652 – 1780,” Journal of Southern African Studies 18 (1992), pp. 803-824
8.
Mohamed Adhikari, “A Total Extinction Confidently Hoped for: The Destruction of Cape San Society under Dutch Colonial rule, 1700 – 1795,” Journal of Genocide Research 12 (2010), pp.19-44
9.
Lance van Sittert, “The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891 – 1910,” Journal of Social History, 37 (2004), pp. 915-937.
10. Unpublished transcript of text of opening address for the Front Tears Exhibition by Christine Dixie, Ibis Art Gallery, Nieu-Bethesda, 1997. 11. The ANC (African National Congress) is South Africa’s governing political party. 12. Ed Cropley, “Karoo Fracking: Water, Wealth and Whites,” Mail and Guardian, 10 October 2013 <www. mg.co.za/article/2013-10-28-karoo-fracking-water-wealth-andwhites>, accessed 10 December 2018.
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Dixie, Below the Sediments 13. See Scholes and Schreiner [1]. 14. See Van Sittert [8], p.929. 15. Robert Scholes and Greg Schreiner, “The Scientific Assessment for Shale Gas in the Central Karoo: The Opportunities and Risks.” <www.Scientific-AssessmentBinder1_LOW-RES_INCL-ADDENDA_21Nov2016.pdf > accessed 12 December 2018. 16. See Rubidge [5] p.1. 17. See Adhikari [8] p.26. 18. See Van Sittert [8] p.915. 19. See Rubidge [5] p.2. 20. “Fracking the Karoo, the People Say No,” Karoo Space, 31 January 2011, <www.karoospace.co.za/fracking-the-karoo-the-people-say-no > accessed 10 December 2018.
Biographical Information CHRISTINE DIXIE is a South African artist whose work extends the boundaries of printmaking into multi-dimensional work, performance and installation. Her work is represented in both national and international collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Fine Art at Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa. www.christinedixie.com
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