Project Aims
The project seeks to raise social awareness of the importance of water as a vital natural resource and as a key symbolic element - one that is deeply interwoven into the core of our continued meaningful existence and survival as humans. In turn, this attends our primary project goal: to clearly illustrate why and how water in all its myriad forms is a natural resource that has to be cherished and protected.
University of Pretoria Water Stories
Waterstories is a collaborative, three year community engagement project jointly organised by the division of Fine Art (University of Pretoria) and the Nirox Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind South Africa.
For the duration of the project (2024-2026) the third year Fine Art Students of the University of Pretoria will work with the local, semi-rural communities in and around the Nirox Foundation in order to give artistic form to the vital and highly varied role that water plays in their lives.
Together with members of the community (and with the assistance of experts or local community leaders as relevant) the students will explore various personal, scientific, cultural and practical properties of water. They will then collectively produce books that showcase the outcomes of this collaborative artistic investigation such as artworks, poems, performances, talks and workshops.
Each student will also be expected to write an academic essay upon completion of the project detailing the process in a self-reflective, scholarly manner. The students will be expected to hand in three self-reflective reports during the course of the project. These materials (books, essays and reports) will, in modified form, also form part of a larger (open access) water archive to be kept at the Nirox Foundation for future study and further public dissemination.
The water archive will become a repository of the meaningful role(s) and function(s) of water in the local community. However given the particular context within which the project takes place (Nirox Foundation, The Cradle of Humankind) the project will have greater significance and impact. The project responds to the following identified needs:
The primary natural water supply of the Cradle of Humankind, the Bloubankspruit is currently polluted so that it threatens the ecosystem of the entire region - including the numerous cave system that preserve the anthropological records of early hominids, the ground water and finally the Hartebeestpoort Dam where it culminates.
Project Outcomes
Conceive and successfully complete a collaborative arts community engagement project at the NIROX Foundation. This will be achieved by way of group/ individual consultations with the project participants at NIROX & by workshopping ideas, concepts and relevant artistic practices in class. During the week-long site visits at Nirox students are expected to become familiar with the individuals they have been assigned to; engage in a reciprocal process of creative thinking and problem solving; and finally conceive a successful collaborative outcome on site at the community space. Students must thoroughly document this process in a variety of ways including photographic, video documentation, sound clips.
