In the heart of the Cradle of Human Kind in South Africa, we look through a garden sculpture inspired by the SAN people, known to possibly carry the oldest DNA of the human species, and question, in a dialogue between Art and Science, the limits of our humanity.
Au coeur du « Berceau de l’Humanité », en Afrique du Sud, une sculpture de jardin dédiée au peuple SAN, probable porteur de l’ADN le plus ancien de l’espèce humaine, nous interroge et nous engage dans un dialogue entre Art et Science jetant une lumière inattendue sur les limites de notre humanité.
Dr. Soodyall is the Director of the Human Genomic Diversity and Disease Research Unit, which was established in 2001 by the Medical Research Council of South Africa in partnership with the National Health Laboratory Service and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She is also a Principal Investigator, representing sub-Saharan Africa, on the 5-year global Genographic Project — conceived by the National Geographic Society in partnership with the IBM Corporation and the Waitt Foundation. Dr. Soodyall’s current research focuses on human populations and the evolutionary genetics of sub-Saharan African and Indian Ocean populations and uncovering population histories and affinities.
Lee Berger is an award-winning paleoanthropologist whose explorations into human origins on the African continent, Asia, and Micronesia for the past three decades have resulted in many new discoveries, including the discovery of two new species of early human relatives – Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi. These discoveries were recognized by the Smithsonian as among the ten most important scientific discoveries of the decade in 2020. A current National Geographic Explorer in Residence, Berger won the first National Geographic Society Research and Exploration Prize in 1997.
David Pearce is Associate Professor in the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. Professor Pearce’s primary research interest is in cognitive archaeology, specializing in southern African hunter-gatherers. He works mostly with Later Stone Age rock art and related archaeology in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province Drakensberg mountains. His other major interest is in the chronology and direct dating of rock paintings.
Professor of Fine Art
Pippa Skotnes is an artist, curator, scholar, and director of the Centre for Curating the Archive. She has a BAFA degree, a Post Graduate Diploma in Printmaking, a Master of Fine Art degree and a Doctor of Literature degree. Her major interests include bookarts, curatorship and archive, in particular the Bleek and Lloyd collection and its extended archive.
James Suzman is a social anthropologist. He is the author of Affluence Without Abundance (2017) and Work (2020). He holds a PhD from Edinburgh University. In 2001 he was awarded the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University. He is a fellow of Robinson College Cambridge. For much of the past three decades, James has been documenting the encounter between one of the world’s last community of autonomous hunter-gatherers, the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and the expanding global economy.
Rachel J. Watkins is an American biocultural anthropologist and educator. Her research focuses on the physiological impact of poverty and inequality on the human body, with an emphasis “on the biological and social history of African Americans living in the 19th and 20th century urban US”.
Watkins currently is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the American University in Washington DC
Has devoted her artistic practice to overcome the natureculture-dichotomy with various media and in interdisciplinary collaborations since the 1980s. Her work is characterized by complex long-term experimental settings and hermetic systems, in which painting takes a central position in various, also unbounded forms.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Hot, the already emerging „Climate Crisis“, which she artistically addresses from then on. But she does not turn to Land Art or gestural-abstract landscape painting, which her teacher, the Danish painter and geologist Per Kirkeby, taught her during her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, but to the “garden” with its heterotopic-picturesque (i.e. “picture-worthy”) implications, the “garden” as a political-ecological projection surface for model-like constructed worlds of desire and thus as an artistic terrain of action.
SAN people Grashoek & Tsumkwe, Namibia
⁄⁄uce N≠amce (Ancestry testing)
Kxau N!aici (Healing)
Kxan⁄⁄ae !amace (Translator)
Kxan⁄⁄ae !amace (Hunting)
Kxau N!aici (Hunting)
Cwisa N≠amce (Plant-Knowledge)
⁄asa N≠amce ( Plant-Knowledge)
Healers, dancers, singers
⁄⁄uce Kxao
⁄⁄uce N⁄onuo
Kharu ⁄kun
⁄isa Tsaan
