Art In The Right Place

RON SWILLING discovers land artists etching a giant wild horse into the Namib landscape.

- Ron Swilling

It’s a blustery day in Klein Aus, southwestern Namibia when I meet up with the Site Specific Collective, a group of artistic volunteers whose passion for creating art in nature inspires them to brave the South African (and Namibian) extremes.

The brightly-dressed bunch, seemingly oblivious to the weather, is hammering old fence droppers into the ground in areas marked out with pieces of string. The land stretches out around them in a soothing medley of earth colours, backed by rocky granitic-gneiss hills. I am directed to Anni Snyman in her generous red hat and her brother PC Janse van Rensburg, the pair who have combined skills to create a series of geoglyphs, or earth drawings.

Between the hammering and wind, I hear their story – and discover the 100m x 150m galloping wild horse that will emerge in the landscape by the end of the week. “We call the geoglyphs ‘thinking paths’,” Anni tells me. “We normally make walking paths. The whole illustration is always one line so that if you start walking from one point, you’ll find yourself back where you started. It’s like a mediation path – a labyrinth.”

The third geoglyph to be created by the siblings and their team of volunteers is unlike the two they previously worked on in the Karoo – the Snake Eagle in Matjiesfontein and the Riverine Rabbit Thinking Path in Loxton. Because of the sensitivity of the Namib Desert environment, visitors won’t walk this path, but will walk up to the viewpoint on the nearby koppie to look down on the horse galloping across the plains. This concept of adapting their artwork to the environment and its particular topography led to the name of the collective – Site Specific.