Planetarische Bauern

The immersive visual, sonic and performative environments by Helena Uambembe (born 1994) explore the residual lingering architectures of violence, indifference, and the affective emotional triggers embedded in the everyday. Raised in the militarized, semi-forgotten enclave of Pomfret, South Africa – home to exiled Angolan soldiers and their families – Uambembe’s practice arises from an intimate reckoning with displacement, fractured memory, and geographies of erasure. Her installation for Planetary Peasants reflects on the formative roles of violence and religion in shaping social order. Birds of the Skies, a sonic collaboration with writer Lindokuhle Nkosi, departs from the Protestant missionary project as a colonial instrument, tracing its subtle, coercive impositions across the South African landscape in the wake of the 1652 Dutch settlement at the Cape.