Abstract
This dissertation offers an artistic research approach to reimagine the hydrocolonial (Hofmeyr
2022) practice of water storage in the Vaal Dam and the Integrated Vaal River System (IVRS). In
focusing on a dam system that is the major resource for Johannesburg (a landlocked city built in
relation to gold extraction), the dissertation seeks to conceive this water beyond the economic and
racially-oriented model of resource and waste using a diverse range of interdisciplinary orientations
– sociological, theoretical, art historical and architectural. The intention, in engaging widely, is to
bring attention to the interconnected, heterogeneous nature of this water, to preface its meaning and
value as a cultural and political tool.
The artistic research was conducted to think ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ the water of this system, to
practice a series of embodied, self-reflexive and interactive activations that demonstrate the water’s
entanglement in its environments. The research consisted of two related modes of making: the first
being situated papermaking along the trajectory of the IVRS, from the Lesotho Highlands Project to
the Vaal Dam. This action focused on the water’s materiality along its trajectory: highlighting the
ways in which it is saturated with the hydro-colonial, the ecological and the legacies of apartheid.
The second mode of making offered two artistic interventions: A Turbid Body, Suspended (2024) at
University of Johannesburg’s Bunting Campus, and A Pooling (2024) at UJ Island in the middle of
the Vaal Dam, which engaged with questions of site and representation in collective reimagining of
this water system. Both revealed insights into the hydro-politics of the IVRS and highlighted the
diverse materialities of water and the socio-political dynamics of water management, moving
beyond simplistic understandings of water as a homogeneous resource.