Pretoria-based visual artist, Setlamorago Mashilo (Mash), was in residence at NIROX building up to the soil & water exhibition, for the purposes of producing a large-scale, outdoor work, which was supported by the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust.

“During my stay at the Villa-Legodi centre for sculpture at Nirox Residency,  I’ve been trying to bring to life a sculptural work that deploys a constellation of discarded found natural material collected throughout my stay. To begin to create metonymical representations of ancestral figures that I call ‘Diviners’. The accumulation and re-aestheticisation of these found materials will hopefully unravel a slew of conceptual and discursive possibilities that centre around our relation with soil and water. I imagine royals, diviners, land workers, merchants, hunters, animals, herbalists, artists and the like, have frequented these lands and immersed themselves in its wisdoms and sustenance, while engaging in the act of resting, which ceased to be a quotidian act of inactivity or relaxation but became a necessary bodily, political, spiritual and creative act of entering into a communion with the land and those who previously dwelt on it. The bigger sentiment of my residency work is that no paths are unfamiliar since the ancestors of yesterday have chartered similar territories and are thus re-enacting their movements in the present time through my stay. This subsequently presents an investigation of the relationship between past, present, and future as being interlaced with and into one another in complex ways.”