Quiet Water Quiet Soil
A drawn meditation on water and soil. Over the past decade, Neustetter has explored the spaces above and below the landscape, where the earth breathes air and water through its portal-like caves, volcanoes, subterranean rivers, and natural wells.
In 2025, upon returning to the Cradle of Humankind with camera, paper, and drawing tools in hand, the artist set out alone in search of ways to capture a fleeting trace of this seemingly timeless breath. Through marks, forms, film, and image, he attempts to connect with that which is greater, smaller, and ultimately beyond understanding.
This gesture finds resonance in his abstract studio dialogue with musicians Anathi Conjwa and Micca Manganye, together seeking to give voice to our fragile tether to the earth.
Marcus Neustetter (AT/ZA)
Marcus Neustetter (b. 1976, Johannesburg) earned his Master’s Degree in Fine Arts (2001) from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
His practice is driven by an interest in cross-disciplinarity, site-specificity, socially engaged interventions, and the intersections of art and cultural activism. Neustetter has created artworks, exhibitions, projects, performances, and installations across Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Balancing poetic form with critical inquiry, he adapts his media to concept and context, while drawing remains his central thinking process. Experimentation, collaboration, and dialogue—with co-producers as well as audiences—are integral to his approach. As a result, his practice often extends into the public sphere, with the studio functioning as a space of co-production and exchange. His projects frequently engage the intersections of art, science, technology, and society, seeking new perspectives on both process and impact.
Alongside his solo career, Neustetter works as an artistic director, facilitator, researcher, and strategist across diverse creative fields. For more than two decades, he has co-directed The Trinity Session in South Africa, building networks and opportunities that extend beyond his personal practice toward entrepreneurial and alternative cultural ecosystems. Since 2020, he has also been developing transdisciplinary collaborations between science, philosophy, and art through THE ZoNE collective in Austria; advancing methodologies for addressing the meta-crisis with broader audiences in The Perspective Studio; and critically engaging with questions of space stations and habitats in Space Shelter Earth.
Since relocating from Johannesburg to Vienna in 2020, Neustetter has been applying his lived experiences and engaged practices across both contexts, pursuing new strategies, networks, and opportunities for collaboration across disciplines and borders.
