Die skrywer en digter Dominique Botha het die Suidoosterfees se visuelekuns-program vir 2026 met ’n aangrypende toespraak geopen. (Foto: Gys Loubser)
Dominique Botha het op 30 April 2026 die Suidoosterfees se kunsuitstalling geopen. Die tema van die fees se kunsprogram vanjaar was Komvandaan: Waar die natuur jou naam onthou. Carin Bester is die fees se kunskurator.
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Ek is dankbaar dat daar ’n wind is wat sterk genoeg is om sy eie naam te hê. ’n Wind waaroor Jan van Riebeeck in sy dagboek geween het, en in sy verslae aan die Here XVII in Holland beskryf het as nog erger as die berugte Japanese tifoon. Ek is dankbaar vir hierdie wind met sy eie naam, wat wonderlike mense in mekaar se arms inwaai. Groot waardering en bewondering is wat julle toekom, die Suidoosterspan – Jana, Melt, Marlene – en elke persoon hier betrokke as toeskouer of deelnemer of beskermheer, vir die werk wat julle doen met die wind van voor en oraloor. Ons sien en waardeer dit.
Carin Bester, kurator van die Suidoosterfees se visuelekuns-program, het feesgangers op ’n rondleiding van uitstallings en installasies geneem. (Foto: Charl Fölscher)
Vanoggend behoort egter aan Carin Bester wat hierdie uitstalling bedroom het en die kunstenaars wat haar tema, Komvandaan, uit lig en kleur kon optower. En vir my die geleentheid gegun het om ’n bietjie oor komvandaan te besin.
Die woord het my dadelik herinner aan ’n gesprek met ’n ou skrywersvriend wat in die buiteland gewoon het, oorspronklik as banneling maar later as ontheemde: “Maak vir jouself ’n vesting in die Boland voor dit te laat is,” het hy gesê. “Mense wat hul komvandaan verloor het, woon altyd in te veel plekke, op soek na leweneersit. Vra maar vir my, ek weet waarvan ek praat.”
Vir dié van julle wat nie tintinkietaal verstaan nie, let me translate: “Make yourself a sanctuary in the Boland,” an old writer friend and exile once told me, “before it’s too late.” He said, “People who have lost their origins always live in too many places, looking for a final resting place.”
Feesgangers by Stillewe, ’n uitstalling deur Frances VH Mohair Tapestries, Siyabonga Fani en Siyanda Sipolo, is geïnspireer deur die oop ruimtes en kleure van die Karoo. (Foto: Charl Fölscher)
My own komvandaan is a farm in the Free State, where my forefathers stayed put and farmed along a muddy river since the Great Trek. Never even owned a caravan. That landscape, through which a muddy river runs, is a flat canvas, where Pierneef made the clouds and the clouds made Pierneef. Where the dog’s name was Wollie and the cat’s name Magriet. Where summer was a C major of sunflowers, and cosmos the autumn’s stolen kiss along the verges, before winter laid her bleach across the washing line, and Pa and his labourers worked till late in the night to get the maize off the lands.
For a bit of heat, the men huddled around braziers, rolling Boxer tobacco in last week’s newspaper, while we played hide-and-seek below their glowing stompies and surreptitious Sesotho, until we were chased home to lie under winter sheets with only our noses sticking out like small frozen peaks from under the blankets. On the lookout for the graveyard angel, who shuffled down the corridor, with her wings scraping against the portraits of all our ugly forefathers. And then we almost died a thousand deaths.
And when I woke up, I was suddenly grown up, a whole lifetime later, on a farm in a biblical valley in the Boland, full of priests, pigeons and choirs carolling in glad adoration, where people do not speak Afrikaans, they speak poetry.
Die kunstenaar Henk Serfontein was onder die feesgangers wat die kunsrondleiding meegemaak het. (Foto: Charl Fölscher)
The name of my farm is Bethlehem, which means “place of bread” in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and is hemmed in by hamlets whose roots reach back all the way to manumission. The freed slaves must surely have known what it is to wrestle through the night with the angel of God. Their descendants revere the beauty that surrounds them, not as a given but as a recurring miracle of majesty. Even the pear trees are good Christians, of the cultivar Bon Chrétien, an artefact of the Huguenots who fled the stake and forgot France, but to this day remember how to turn water into wine.
When the sun sinks behind the pass, the Drakenstein cliffs turn the colour of juniper gin. Her slopes wear a skirt of fynbos, lined with an emerald flash of sunbirds, when the southeaster kicks her coat open. And on her wrist, a corsage of white bells on softly stridulating stems. The star-of-Bethlehem flower that chinks when you rub the stalks together. Chink. Chink. Chincherinchee. Poisonous to horses, herald of summer, when our whitewashed house sparkles like a wedding cake in the sun, and mice jeté across the courtyard to share the strawberries with the robin choristers. (There is no house cat.)
Palesa Motheo van die Suidoosterfees het feesgangers touwys gemaak by die interaktiewe installasie Die betekenis van ‘tuiste’. (Foto: Charl Fölscher)
The devil also lives there, in a deep ravine behind my house, amid chameleons and koekemakranka. There where the moon is born, rising like an almond sugared for a wedding feast, and rousing every lovesick frog in the vlei into a frenzy.
In the distance, where the valley fans open into sunlight, lies the prison where Madiba had to serve out his sentence. Only the name has changed.
On Sundays there is a phone-in programme on the radio where messages from family members are read to the prisoners.
“Mamma wonder of jy warm genoeg is.”
“Kinta, ons verlang na jou.”
“Riedewaan Windvogel, ons vergewe jou.”
On Sundays there are also church services when the hills are alive with the sound of music made by the family Keet of Kylemore, like a Boland family Von Trapp. After the recent Easter service a Mozambican man stood up and said, “If me and my family were able to understand Afrikaans, we would have joined this church. This is my second time visiting this church and I never felt more at home in South Africa like in Kylemore.”
A Zimbabwean congregant stood up and said, “This is the only place where I don't feel like I don't belong in this country. All people here treat me like a human being.
For some, the loss of komvandaan is more than nostalgia. And in that Boland valley I have seen how people with little to spare, but so much to give, have built sanctuaries out of the generosity of the human heart.
I am one of the lucky ones. But my newfound paradise is sometimes lonely. My children are gone. My husband is a wandering Jew. Bereft of purpose, no longer needed, I stroll from room to room, embracing the curtains that drop down from ceilings high enough for a soprano to hit the top note of Mozart’s “Queen of the Night aria” against the rafters.
In the evenings it’s just me and the owls, hooting their mournful wisdom. “Hoot-hoot,” says my friend the exile, who left us to join the forest philosophers. “Release your longing for Free State thunderstorms. Cede your heart to these mountains and this wind.”
But the heart is a sly fish that is not easily lured into the present.
“Survival is to be on the verge of departure,” my friend the exile wrote before he died, “even if your destination is uncertain. It is to sit in front of the window and dream about next year, even if ‘next year’ is made up of fragments and elisions from your past that you continue to recreate.”
Life is paradox. We are trying to find our way forward, by trying to find our way back, to that place we can never live in again, but to which we will all ultimately return. That is the principle of dust to dust. Give away your metaphors, your mise en scène, minuets and miniatures. Generosity is the first principle of creativity. It is the fish and loaves of love.
In the end making art never makes you rich, but we are so much the richer for it.
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Die Suidoosterfees se kunsprogram is vanjaar moontlik gemaak deur die ondersteuning van die Spier Arts Trust en die Wes-Kaapse Onderwysdepartement (WKOD).
Die hoofborge van die Suidoosterfees is die Wes-Kaapse regering en die provinsie se Departement van Kultuursake en Sport, Stad Kaapstad, Netwerk24, Die Burger, NATi, kykNET, die ATKV, dotsure.co.za en Kunstekaap.
Lees ook:
Komvandaan: Waar die natuur jou naam onthou – Suidoosterfees se visuelekunsprogram
Suidoosterfees 2026: Onderhoud oor die Jakes Gerwel-gespreksreeks