The dirty belly of the cloud will drag across the ground; the dusty stomach of the earth will yet graze the sky

This two week long durational performance at My Body My Space Public Arts Festival consisted of four stages:

Firstly, earth was collected from three sites of direct lightning strikes across rural Mpumalanga, one of the areas with the highest density of lightning strikes across Southern Africa. These lightning-earth samples were: 1) soil surrounding the roots of a tree split in half by lightning, 2) earth from the centre of a scorched grassland set ablaze by a bush-fire ignited by a lightning strike, and 3) the footprints preserved in mud of three cows that were found dead after being struck by lightning.

Secondly, these lightning-earth samples were hand-processed in public space using a process of repeated bucket distillation and straining through old pillowcases to create mouldable lightning-clays. The public were openly invited to participate in this process at all times.

Thirdly, these lightning-clays were played with in public space, the artist covering their body in the clay, listening through their skin to the energies and stories that the clay had to tell, moulding the clay freely into different shapes, moving with the clay across the festival space and surrounding town of Machadodorp. As part of this process a selection of clay pots with faces for lids were made and the tangles of roots that had been extracted from the earth whilst processing were placed inside these pots.

Fourthly, on the main day of performances of the festival, the artist presented a movement-poem attempting to condense some of the sensations that the clay had whispered into their skin into a shorter-form performance. Here they extracted clouds of earth with dangling roots of lightning from a pile of unprocessed lightning-earth before distributing the pots full of roots throughout the audience. The growling, whirring, booming sound poem delivered throughout the piece emerges gradually upon an exhortation from the earth – “May every lightning strike inject poetry into the earth and may all those who have stolen land know that it was never theirs“. What remains of the processed lightning-clay is shared throughout the audience to be further played with and listened to by all.

Performance produced on the occasion of My Body My Space Public Arts Festival, Emakhazeni, Mpumalanga, South Africa, March 2025. Informed by work as artist in residence at Wits School of Arts and Johannesburg Lightning Research Laboratory, University of the Witwatersrand.

Photos: Christo Doherty.