‘Safe in the shadows’ is an interactive installation that reclaims darkness as sanctuary. The collective assembles a network of cairns – stone, translucent resin, and salvaged remnants – linked by root-like conduits that echo mycelial threads and neural pathways. Each cairn shelters a different interior ecology: roots, light, two-way mirror, tablet.
To look, participants kneel and peer into deep openings; their faces complete the missing capstone, becoming ritual actors. Inside, states shift: dim reflectivity mingles landscape and fractured self; bright apertures pierce the mirror to reveal digital underworlds – AI-generated archives, live feeds from distant cairns, or simply light as form.
Drawing from ancestral traditions, the work challenges the equation of light as safety and darkness as danger. What is proposed is an ethics of shadow: resistance to compulsory visibility, memory transmitted beyond surveillance, and transformation that happens underground.
Jonathan O’Hear is an interdisciplinary artist who has been working with light, video and DIY tech for three decades. His practice spans video, lumino-kinetic sculptures, experiential spaces, AI, electronics, DIY, and punk ethos. His interests lie in how light, technology, and digital culture affect us as individuals and societies.
Nathalie Ponlot is a Belgian artist who has worked as an actress for many years, crafting her singular way of working with movement and voice. Today, her performance and visual art practices explore the deep links that unite us with the earth, sky and all living entities.
Qondiswa James is a freelance cultural worker living in Johannesburg. She is an award-winning writer, performer and theatre-maker, performance and installation artist, arts facilitator and activist. Her work engages the socio-political imagination towards mobilising transgression.
Themba Stewart is immersed in technical production with a strong creative focus. He is a theatre-maker, lighting and installation artist, designer, builder, teacher, curator, technical, tour and production manager. As an artist, Themba is interested in installation as narrative, using technical aspects to tell a story.
Why a collective? There is no such thing as sole ownership in creativity. The myth of the genius artist and individual authorship damages more creators than it supports, yet it persists.
Our collective practice challenges this framework. Working together generates a richness of concepts, forms and materialities that individual practice cannot achieve. Rather than reducing this multiplicity to satisfy market demands for singular vision, we embrace abundance.
We use the collective as a circulation system where ideas build and transform each other, creating spaces for fundamental elements to emerge. This process renders ownership irrelevant and establishes true shared authorship.
By operating this way, we expose the injuries within dominant creative systems while modeling an alternative. Our work cross-pollinates and is cross-pollinated beyond our immediate practice, contributing to an ecosystem where creative value isn't measured by individual achievement or market metrics, but by the generative potential of shared inquiry.