HOW IT ALL BEGAN
How did it come about that a scrambled note written on a serviette in a Starbucks Café in Washington, D.C., in 2013 ended up as, well, a message about water conservation written in the sand at Namtib Biosphere Reserve in 2016? In May 2019 Anni Snyman, PC Janse van Rensburg and a team of volunteers from the Site-Specific land art collective finetuned the last lines of the giant earth drawing of a desert horse at Klein Aus Vista. This message of intent recently evolved into yet another possible new chapter – as I made my way down a secluded gravel road to a breathtakingly beautiful house in the middle of the desert: an artist’s retreat in the making at Wolwedans. But more about the other outcomes later: drawings of a wild horse – and the realm of “dancing wolves”.
B
ack to the reality of a noisy Starbucks Café and the coffee-soaked serviette.
At the time the note simply said Strijdom – Namibia, it was just an intention written down, probably to combat the growing riot in my mind with something positive. I had (unfortunately) arrived in the United States at the time of the horrific Boston Marathon bombing, a terrorist attack on April 15th, 2013.
Land art is the creation of art with what is available at a specific site.
The peace and quiet of south-western Namibia at Namtib Biosphere Reserve – and the Tiras Mountains – were a long way from there, worlds apart in fact, and a far cry from the act of violence replayed a million times on the television screen in my miserably small hotel room. In spite of the warning on the news – in the wake of the Boston bombing – that visitors should refrain from going to crowed tourism spots, I was hell-bent on visiting the famous Smithsonian Institution, in search of inspiration – in search of kindred spirits.
TRAVEL NEWS NAMIBIA WINTER 2019
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