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Worldmaking with Eco-Social Public Art
(interactive artistic contribution)
Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee
An impromptu public artwork in 2012, Hover, in the cultural district of Maboneng, Johannesburg, South Africa, set the scene for how intuitive work led to the Green Pee Pot in 2023 in the same street. This early work in the public space develops over the next decade into more deliberate interventions which takes care of the greener urban living in the complex era of climate change.
The Green Pee Pot is a nature-based urban solution for the stench caused by public urination. Johannesburg’s failing urban infrastructure has caused most public ablutions to be closed indefinitely. Urine friendly plants process the urine in these off the grid pot plants whilst reducing smell on the streets. It is one of many eco-social interventions I have worked on in South Africa and Europe. The presentation will situate this case study in a transdisciplinary research praxis of taking care of the earth, humans, and non-humans. This pilot intervention shows how other types of knowledge are carefully woven into inspiring surprising solutions.
I completed a rigorous interrogation in 2022, as a Master of Science study at the University of the Witwatersrand which examined the characteristics of environmentally focussed public artworks around the world. The study isolated key features which artists with the intention to reach new audiences use. These features include regenerative, participatory, and co-learning traits which take extra care to produce site sensitive culturally specific interventions in public space. The combination of these features can be used by all other disciplines to urgently roll research out into the world.
Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee (b. 1971, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based visual artist and honorary research fellow at the Global Change Institute (WITS University). Her relational practice regularly centres on public shared spaces and landscapes, where she produces interventions that ranges from ephemeral to permanent. Originating out of her respect and concern for the environment, Coetzee employs nature-based solutions, most often built out of reclaimed industrial waste, to form unlikely partnerships, including with the surrounding land. Research into these materials and the context of their deployment on-site remains a fundamental component of Coetzee’s process, allowing her to orient her work around its immediate community or audience and locate meaning inherent to the materials used, and thus connecting the participants to the intervention. As a transdisciplinarian, Coetzee’s practice seeks to build new creatures marrying environmental science and social action to better encourage empathy for and engagement with nature.
In 2022 she completed her Master of Science dissertation (with distinction) with Coleen Vogel and Lenore Manderson as supervisors. She interrogated the role of art as a medium for social action at the Wits Animal, Plants and Environmental Science School titled: Eco-Art for a Transformative Climate Culture. As research fellow she presents ways on how scientists can reach wider climate audiences through interrogating the ways artists have reached audiences in the past.
She has been invited to many arts and science engagements and exhibited widely in South Africa and abroad in public space, galleries, sculpture parks, arts residencies, and informal pop-ups. Her most recent solo exhibition In mid-loping gait was well received in the USA in 2023 with an ongoing series of creature drawings. She was a Rupert Foundation, Social Impact Art Prize recipient in 2022 with A Still Life and a Claire and Eduardo Villa grantee in 2016. In January 2024, Hannelie is artist-in-residence at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. https://www.hanneliecoetzee.com/
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman