In the Greek tragedy, Orpheus loses his dead wife Eurydice a second time as he fails to fulfil the condition of bringing her back to life: not to look back at her as she crosses the threshold from dead to living. The artwork’s title, ‘Orpheus’, refers to the colonisation of Stellenbosch and the incessant gaze of historically white wine farmers looking at the soil as a resource. ‘Orpheus’ is a glass neon light sculpture derived from a digital rendering of a font that the artist developed from the Australian parasite plant, dodder. The parasite plant cannot photosynthesise; instead, it extracts nutrients from host plants through suctioning tendrils. Dodder’s ‘long strings of cursive writing’ inscribes its tendrils on host plants, strangling them while calling things into being – one cannot invoke without naming and the parasite font forms words to call to them.

Georgia Munnik is a visual artist and writer from Cape Town. She has an MFA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Norway and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Johannesburg.

She specialises in future-speculative ecological sculpture and image-making at the intersection of plant ecology and colonial-descendent self-memorialisation practices in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Her work has been shown internationally in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and Switzerland. Recent achievements include Pro Helvetia Studio Residency in Basel and a solo exhibition at A4 Arts Foundation. She writes regularly for Artthrob.