Catalogue > At random

If the river’s mouth could speak, what would it say? Enacting the possibility of river mouths as storytellers and historiographers, Kammakamma is the opening episode of the second work in a moving-image trilogy exploring the Eerste River in South Africa as witness and carrier of submerged narratives. Its title evokes slippages between the Khoekhoe terms for water (//amma) and similitude (khama), with 'kamma' absorbed into Afrikaans as 'make believe.' Through three interconnected chronicles by Abri de Swardt, poet Ronelda S. Kamfer, and historian Saarah Jappie, the river becomes a saturation point for understanding climate and catastrophe. In this episode, De Swardt probes a founding myth of Afrikanerdom through Hendrik Biebouw, a teenage idler who in 1707 attacked a Dutch East India Company watermill at the river, drunkenly declaring himself an “Africaander” – then a term reserved for enslaved, manumitted, or indigenous peoples. Biebouw’s declaration is inextricable from the river where it was spoken, from wine as settler-colonial agent, and from the instability of language itself. Recast in purgatory, he sifts sand from sandbags mined around the river mouth back into the blocked confluence of the Eerste and Plankenbrug Rivers, his delirious oratory jumbling Afrikaans, Dutch, German, and Malagasy. Interludes filmed after flooding show the river as both wild and engineered, while tableaux drawn from swimming and life-saving manuals foreground burden and suffocation. Through double synchronisation De Swardt frames perception itself as intoxicating disorientation.

Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working across video, photography, sculpture, and performance, De Swardt’s practice challenges the ongoing effects of settler-colonial whiteness and masculinity in Southern Africa, and perceptions of queerness as ‘unnatural’ and ‘unAfrican’, through joining historiography with fiction, auto-ethnography, ecology, desire, and the fantastical. De Swardt’s work has been exhibited, performed, and screened at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg, amongst others. Solo exhibitions include POOL x Field Station, Cape Town (2024); POOL, Johannesburg (2018); MOT International Projects, London (2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (2011). De Swardt has undertaken residencies at Rupert, Vilnius; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen; and the Nirox Foundation, Cradle of Humankind. In 2022, he was awarded a Social Impact Arts Prize and nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a 2025–2026 artistic fellow at Braunschweig Projects, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.