Pieter Colyn is a South African Land Artist and Landscape Designer based in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is the owner and founder of ART Cederberg, a growing outdoor sculpture park where people can experience contemporary sculptures by leading South African artists set against the backdrop of pristine nature and ancient rock forms.
Land Art
A Selection of Signature Projects
Introduction
Breath Congo:
In this penultimate Viewing Room, we’re moving into the green. Breathe Congo: a Reflection on the Growing Deforestation of Central Africa’s Rainforest is a land art piece with accompanying text, first presented at the Stellenbosch Triennale in South Africa (2020). This is a living interactive artwork – a spiraling path of trees, an opportunity to go inward and to reflect. Honoring the green heart of Africa, the world’s second lung, the artwork is a meditative path and an elemental gesture contemplating the beauty and fragility of our relationship and interdependence with one another and with our natural world.
The Congo Basin in central Africa is home to the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world after the Amazon. Often referred to as the “Green Heart” of Africa and the “World’s Second Lung”, the Congo Basin rainforest is around 301 million hectares and spans six countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. This large and important wilderness region absorbs vast amounts of carbon dioxide which is crucial to the fight against climate change, helping to mitigate rising global temperatures. Additionally, it helps to regulate local and global rainfall, to safeguard both water and soil quality, and to control the disease.
France’s Environment Minister Ségolène Royal has stated that researchers believe that deforestation in Central Africa may have catalyzed the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa: ‘This destruction of the natural habitat of fruit-eating bats drove the animals to approach human settlements to find food and the virus may have been transmitted during this increased contact resulting from deforestation…
Factors that are contributing to deforestation and destruction of the Congo Basin rainforests:
- Growing global demand for coffee and cocoa – this region produces 70% of the world’s cocoa.
- Unprecedented timber demand, with specifically rapid growth in demand from China.
- Unsustainable, unregulated, and illegal harvesting of wood.
- Road-building by industrial logging companies has created opportunities for further illegal logging and wildlife poaching in remote areas once unreachable.
How do we help to create an emotional connection to the wealth of environmental data available to us? How do we instill a sense of urgency and also a sense of agency? Perhaps through beauty, and the simple experience of walking slowly through a cool and calm spiral of trees, the spiral of life, whose center reveals a mirror that reflects a glimpse of ourselves amidst the trees and sky, we can provide a visceral understanding and personal connection in ways that environmental data may not offer on its own. The opportunity to observe ourselves and our actions is a reminder that we are active participants within an inseparable whole.
Converging – Meul Plein
CONVERGING I is intended to serve as a living symbol of coming together created along the path of green that comprises the inaugural Garden Week Stellenbosch. 4,000 Eragrostis capensis plants, an evergreen perennial grass indigenous to the Western Cape, have been placed upon a literal point of convergence—Meulplein—the location where Bird, Mill, and Church Streets all physically meet within the city of Stellenbosch and which now houses De Nieuwe Molen.
These grasses are sculpted around and by the elemental:
- Metal
- River Rock
- Sun
- Wind
- Time
These grasses are framed by our history, sometimes falling within its shadow, depending on the time of day and the location of the sun. This living land art piece will be watered from the rectangular reflecting pool that is fed by the Meulsloot, which is a part of the Eerste River Hydrological system. CONVERGING I explore nature as art, as a symbol, as a witness: indigenous natural and living material, consciously grown, placed, and woven together by a diverse collection of humans. Placed with intention and care, onto this land we call home—fertile earth filled with history and memory—both beauty and pain—to serve as a living talisman for the future that remains unwritten. With time, this living piece will evolve, the inevitability of nature. A reminder of how we, too, grow and grow well: as individuals and as a nation…
We are growing. We are merging. We are converging.
May we do so with care and consciousness. May we all have the opportunity to blossom. With grace. With tolerance. With intelligence. With the understanding that Stellenbosch is a university town and is itself a vibrant and crucial place of convergence: with a beautiful diversity of culture, of language, and of people, coming together to learn, to grow, and to flourish. CONVERGING I is a place to gather. To pause. A moment in time. A reminder that we can and must create beautiful things. And a reminder that we gather—we converge—to grow.
Art Cederberg
ART Cederberg is a growing outdoor sculpture park where people can experience contemporary sculptures by leading South African artists set against the backdrop of pristine nature and ancient rock forms. ART Cederberg is set within 16,000 hectares of protected wilderness and is part of the Klein Cederberg Nature Reserve. ART Cederberg’s mission is to converge art, wilderness, and ecological conservation.
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