HOW DO WE RESTOR INDIGENOUS BIOCULTURAL HERITAGE WITHIN A SYSTEM COMMITTED TO ERASURE AND ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION?

Denisha Anand, Researcher, bio-cultural worker/intersectional environmentalist and environmental educator, in the context of the OPEN SPACE of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Denisha Anand is a bio-cultural worker with a focus on restoration of indigenous land in Cape Town, South Africa. She draws from multi-species ethnographic approaches as well as participatory action research (PAR) to make the invisible and colonized, visible and vocal in the landscape. She works closely with communities and school children to build and reignite custodianship with land again. Lived concepts of belonging and inseparability come through strongly in her work with place and person.

As an intersectional environmentalist, Denisha Anand facilitates the reclaiming of land through the restoration of indigenous vegetation, bringing back the plant medicine, food and kin. With a background in conservation, she is consistently highlighting the need to acknowledge the neglect of land in close proximity to black and brown bodies. All her restoration work is done in former group areas in post-apartheid South Africa and confronts spatial neglect of indigenous landscapes by mainstream conservation.
More information:
http://www.princessvlei.org/natural-heritage.html
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-08-23-ecomaverick-denisha-anand-plants-seeds-of-environmental-change-on-the-cape-flats/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7esXtWGK7JbfQ88a128hGl?si=acfe4a2a03384282’
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3iPy9r0krAYYAUJ9Xp39Mo?si=99f362ce72f140ae
https://200youngsouthafricans.co.za/denisha-environment-2019/
https://www.beautifulnews.com/restoring-former-glory-princess-vlei

ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURES:

The Archive of the Futures is a video archive that gathers the voices of scientists, activists and artists and forms a kind of open archive for the questions and challenges that concern us in the times of the Anthropocene.
The climate crisis and its life-threatening consequences, the excessive waste of resources, the legacy of colonialism, and growing social and economic inequality pose challenges to humanity. How can we confront these? What does it mean to work for a livable future in these times? How can we think and create a fair and livable future? Is the future possible and for whom or what?
The starting point for the video statements are questions that the participants most urgently ask themselves with regard to the future. The questions are intended to provide food for thought about what should be said, questioned and done in the Anthropocene - and about what the future asks us to think.

Conception and realization of the Archive of the Futures: Fiona Schrading and Theresa Dagge.