About

IZINHLELO – Systems of participation and sustainability investigates the creative economy in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The curatorial essay and exhibition explores modes of participation, whether collaboration, holicipation or refusal and the resulting energy or inertia. It looks at how these could build on the latent talent and the tendency towards innovation found in KZN, and how they may contribute towards sustainability.

Izinhlelo traces seven objects originating from KZN – an AI generated album, a hand woven wool tapestry, a documentary film, a Zulu bow instrument, a bow music album, a Sojourner Project presentation and a KZNSA membership card – illustrating how they exist in a precarious system in KZN, and some universally, where the cause and effect, and proximity and distance between them, create energy or result in it lagging into inertia.

A systems approach provides an invaluable device for exploring the interrelatedness of objects, humans, technologies, and the forces in play around them across time. Factoring in ‘the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system’ inspired the user experience of the website design, where the choices observers make while interacting with objects could be unique to them, and catalyse energy of its own (Shanken, 2015: abstract). In a system, interactions are organic rather than linear, holistic rather than singular – ‘a dynamic process of interaction among constituent elements’ (Shanken, 2015: 13).