CHRIS THURMAN: Be here now, while we can receive nature’s yield

The stretch of SA’s coastline from Wilderness to Cape St Francis is so astonishingly beautiful it always surprises me that anyone who lives in this part of the country actually gets anything done. If I had a house along the Garden Route I would spend all day staring out at fynbos and cliffs and sea.

To be fair, the Plettenberg Bay locals I met this week while attending the Plett Arts Festival do dedicate a chunk of their time to oceanic appreciation. Some wander along the beach. Some paddle out in search of whales. Some make music shaped by the ebb and flow of the tide. Some paint pictures of the water in iridescent blues and textured aquamarines. Quite a number of people seem to do all of the above.

Seaside towns tend to attract preternaturally calm, quirkily creative types. But that doesn’t mean it is easy to herd them together to make an arts festival ... or, for that matter, to find them audiences. Enter Cindy Wilson-Trollip, manager of Plett Tourism and connector extraordinaire. Wilson-Trollip and her colleagues have an ambitious task: connecting people and places across the divisions of geography, race, culture and class that mark this town as much as they do any SA locale.

My few days at the festival took me from Kasi Lyfstyle Tshisanyama in Kwanokuthula, the township just outside Plettenberg Bay, to The Space Between, a yoga and mini-retreat centre on the edge of the Robberg Nature Reserve; from the Piesang Valley Community Hall to the Kwendalo holistic wellness estate.

I met arts entrepreneurs like restaurateur-muso Trust Sebofi, who runs Kasi Lyfstyle, and filmmaker-photographer Daron Chatz, organiser of the Land Art event in Plett each year. I encountered musicians like singer-songwriter Hannah Morris who, at the age of 15, has a musical charisma that suggests she will be a future Joni Mitchell or Billie Eilish. And I learned more about artistic ghetto busters like poet-philosopher Was Lemuel (aka Aviwe Mbangwa) and musicians-turned-artists Arno Carstens and David Kantey.

I also had the chance to talk to Cheryl Traub-Adler, who is not only a participant in Chatz’ SPARK Land Art Route but has curated the exhibition Fragile Nature. It features a number of the artists contributing to 2023’s land art event, but the work on display is smaller and emerges from studio practice.

Traub-Adler notes that a debate is embedded in the exhibition title: is nature fragile, or are we actually talking about the precariousness of human survival within an ultimately resilient natural ecosystem? In other words, is the implicit theme “fragile human nature”? Or perhaps the fragility of humans’ relationship with nature?

Mounted in the stunning clifftop location of The Space Between, the works do suggest an asymmetry. Human creative responses are dwarfed by the enormity and majesty of sky and sea, of height and depth. Yet they are absolutely necessary in helping us to locate ourselves on this great globe and within the vast cosmos beyond it. They also remind us of the intricate, intimate beauty of small — and fragile — things in nature: leaves, seeds, bones, colourful pigments.

For Traub-Adler, immersion in nature is part of a survival skill set for the 21st century. It provides a counterforce to the tech-saturated world in which we live, the digital-virtual-AI mishmash for which the human brain is not prepared in evolutionary terms.

Traub-Adler is no techno-phobe. She delights in image-making on her phone and acknowledges the centrality of smartphones to the contemporary art scene. Still, she recognises that land artists face an acute version of the existential dilemma articulated by Susan Sontag when she asserted, as early as the 1970s, that “everything today exists to end in a photograph”. For Traub-Adler, if there are no images to document her process and its (temporary) outcome in the largely-ephemeral practice of land art, the question hovers in the air: has she actually created something?

There is a challenge in all this — or rather, an invitation. I read it on a sign along the road to The Space Between. “Be here, now,” it said. That’s also good advice if you have a free weekend and can get to Plett before the arts festival closes on Sunday.