Dr Sechaba Maape's series of hand-drawn digital prints Noga Mo Jozi – originally shown in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale's South African pavilion, which Maape co-curated – comes to the Atrium at Keyes Art Mile.

Responding to the colonial legacy of architecture in South Africa, Maape challenges Western modes of representing the landscape, drawing instead on indigenous knowledge from his home town of Kuruman in the Northern Cape, his Setswana-speaking community, and rock engravings in the region. In this community, the land is a living being, with water represented by a great snake known as Noga Ya Metsi.

"Rock art from South Africa is where I first saw people doing drawings that represent the landscape as being alive, hence I have adopted similar principles, but applying them in contemporary times. Sometimes the landscape is depicted as a snake, sometimes rain clouds as a hippo, and so on. The point is that these entities were understood as alive in some way, not necessarily literally. Khoe [also known as Khoi] and San people would not think that a cloud is a hippo, but understood that at some deeper level, it has its own life," says Maape, shedding light on his influences. 

When asked how we can start to think of land differently, Maape told us, "I think in architecture it is through representing it differently in drawings, as opposed to just a map. It’s like the difference between an anatomical diagram of your friend, versus a fond photograph. The one is cold, dead, and impersonal; the other is full of meaning, emotion, and memory." Read our interview with Maape here. 

See Noga Mo Jozi in the Atrium of the Trumpet building at Keyes Art Mile until Sat, Aug 24.