For this 10 minute site-specific performance to I recited a set of literary fragments sampled from two texts: Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams and essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942), and Vladimir Illich’s H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of ‘Stuff’ (1985). Each literary fragment was set alight as I read it and placed upon the melting blocks of ice placed in the natural spring.

Thom seeks to re-imagine our current fragile relationship with the earth and its water as a series of literary and material ‘fragments’. (‘Fragments’ here are understood by way of Hannah Arendt’s work, especially inasmuch as her work suggests that we can create the world anew by creatively and imaginatively engaging with the past). In this way fragmentary poetic quotation and associated action function both as a political mode of action and literary investigation in their own right (here Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Benjamin’s ‘Anthologies’ refer). In the performance these historical writings are imaginatively brought back to life in the present as embodied actions, highlighting their potential as repositories for social, cultural and political change.

The performance is a poetic mediation on our changing relationship to water, suggesting by way of action that it is always simultaneously precarious, imaginative and dynamic. Our existence is material and elemental, with its scattered fragments deeply interconnected to the whole – each past fire a possible present form, each melting glacier another rolling wave. Humans, and individuals, are no less implicated or connected and our actions always matter.

The performance took place from within one of the last remaining sources of clean, natural water in the Cradle of Humankind at the Nirox Foundation. The performance was broadcast live to the attendees and participants of the webinar all over the world.

The performance is echoed by another artwork, ‘Will you still be mine (Del Mar)#1’, in which I returned my body weight in ice to the ocean in Mexico on 25 May 2024.

Photographic credits: Alet Pretorius.

Special thanks: Sven Christian, Benji Liebmann

‘Fragment 2’ from ‘when my feet fall asleep (they dream of having gills), formed part of a dual presentation by the artists Johan Thom (SA) and Wayne Binitie (UK) held as part of the webinar ‘The Blazing World, Or the Climatological Imperative: From Inaction to Reimagination’ (Part 2). This webinar was organised by the institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in the United Sates (IDSVA) and held on 22 March 2024.