Sunday 23 August 2015

Anni and PC - sister and brother team who co-founded the Karoo Geoglyphs project

Anni Snyman is an artist from Johannesburg who works in various media, from orchestrating ‘constellations’ of different disciplines and large scale nature installations to small water drawings. She tells us about the origins of the Karoo Geoglyph project.

 “The concept for the Karoo Geoglyph Project originated in the Disobedience discussions in 2008 between Eugenie Grobler and myself.  In 2009 my brother, PC Janse van Rensburg and I collaborated with a group of friends to create the Earth Siren at Africa Burn, and since then the project has evolved. We created the temporary Riverine Rabbit drawing in Richmond in 2012. It took six years to bring the right team of volunteers and supporters together, find the right place in the Karoo, and create the first permanent work – the Snake Eagle Thinking Path.”

Anni is deeply concerned about the threat of destruction that faces the natural world of the Karoo, and wishes to make a contribution to the protection of its people as well as this habitat. “There is also a sense of hopeless loneliness when one faces our voracious consumer culture, with almost no way out of the conundrum of being part of the destruction that one wishes to stop. For me, the community that forms around the making of such an artwork keeps that loneliness somewhat at bay, and I keep working at it in the hope that in this collaborative creative space we will sometimes glimpse a way to be better earthlings."
 
Anni Snyman deep in thought, laying out the grid. Photo Credit: Janet Botes

 
PC Janse van Rensburg is an architect and part of a Cape Town art group that comes together to paint each Monday evening at Jan van Riebeeck Primary School. At the end of each year they hold a Group Exhibition. Choosing oils as his medium, PC finds it “a two way conversation as the medium actively responds to the artist - I look for the unexpected that is revealed through the layering of paint.” So what drew PC from oils to land art as well?
 “After the Pordenone Italy Land Art Biennale, Anni asked me to assist her organise the first Land Art Biennale in Plettenburg Bay, South Africa. I worked with her on various land art projects – and then came the Snake Eagle Thinking Path. I assisted in setting up the grid for the design and was involved in the logistics of producing lime for the dots that make up the path.  I see the Snake Eagle Thinking Path as a practical way of making the public aware of land art in nature and, by using that which is on site, to create awareness of the need to protect the Karoo environment.”
 
PC Janse van Rensburg in oils, by PC      

#Site_Specific Geoglyphs  #KarooGeoglyphs  #SnakeEagleThinkingPath

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