The Eishman cometh again
Etienne de Villiers’ exhibition ‘Landmark’, at the Is Art gallery on the Blaauwklippen wine estate outside Stellenbosch, tackles farm and bloodlines
Possibly no other concept is so loaded with significance and semantics as “farm” in SA. Its Afrikaans equivalent, “plaas”, is embedded in almost all indigenous languages: polase, polasi, iplasi, ipulazi. The compelling thing, though, is that the Dutch origin of the word is “plaats” (place), while “farm” translates as boerderij, (so reverted back to English it would be more a “farmery” than a place). “Plaas” as the local iteration of “farm” is inextricably wound into the very fabric of SA geography everywhere.
Etienne de Villiers tackles this “placeness” of the SA farm in his first solo exhibition at the Is Art Gallery on the Blaauwklippen wine estate outside Stellenbosch, this busy commercial enterprise itself a living demonstration of how layered with divergent endeavours agriculture has become these past 300 years or so...
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