Simamkele Sitwebile
Kaylin Christians

Degraded urban landscapes and leftover parcels of land - road sidings, parking lots, brownfield zones, abandoned plots, and railway yards - are conceived in conventional terms as the useless remnants of functional urban infrastructures, spaces of transit and transition, and indices of neglect and ruination. Defined as sites of a less-than-pristine nature they are often rendered invisible, to be tackled, trimmed and tamed when not left to their own becoming.

Yet a more expansive approach to the urban environment suggests that we view these terrains differently: as places of biological invention, emergence and imaginative possibility, or as parts of a larger network of belonging, what Gilles Clement (2004) calls the “undecided fragments of a planetary garden”. 

In our Where is the Wild workshop, we collaborated with a group of Lalela high school learners on a journey of discovery to explore what we mean when talk about ‘Nature’, what kinds of wildness we could find in some of Cape Town’s in between spaces, and how we might discover this wildness within ourselves, at the messy juncture between co-existence and alienation, working across binaries, and embracing hybridity.

In line with the emergent properties of a wildness that we can’t always anticipate, we felt it was essential to embrace playful and experimental drawing activities, in the studio and in the field, as a way of thinking through different kinds of relationality and reciprocity - between people in pairs, between things, and between people and things in various situations.

This publication is the outcome of that process, and it invites you to engage with our set of encounters by drawing, scribbling, pressing, thinking, writing and performing into the spaces between, to create an expanded (ecological) map of uncommon interconnections.

- Renée Holleman