Sven Christian [SC]: Before starting you mentioned being in the middle of things, and that that was a good place to speak from. So, what are you in the middle of?

Nina Barnett [NB]: Many drippy, watery, transcorporeal experiments.

SC: What do you mean by transcorporeal — through the body?

NB: For me, transcorporeality is about forcing a body (in this case my body) to recognise itself beyond its physical borders. I’ve been reading Stacy Alaimo’s work. She talks about transcorporeality as the point of contact between the human and the more than human — I think about this in terms of water — the ways that water transforms a human body, and that a body is actually mostly water itself. I’m trying to emulate that in the studio. It’s partly why there are many things going on at one time. It’s not like I come to the studio and make a singluar work and then leave. Especially with this body of work, I like to feel immersed, or submerged. The way to do that is through different modes of thinking about what wateriness is; using my body to produce a kind of wateriness that also impacts on me. There’s a dialogue between my own imposition and representation of wateriness and how it feeds back, or is given space to feed back. I’m a bit reluctant to the idea of representing anything, really. Water in particular. In order to not feel like the master or instigator of the interaction, I need to be overwhelmed by it, submerged in it. So I’m not completely in control of anything that I’m doing, by design. This impulse also comes from my research into the problematics of damming, really — holding water in place.

SC: You’ve also been making paper, so there’s the transformation of wood too. The way it’s exposed to water or leaving it out in the rain…

NB: A lot of my PhD is trying to insist on creative practice into the field of research, which is a hard push. The way to do that, for me, is to make physical things that I’m reading about. So I read about an idea and then try to find ways with material, not replicate that, but to speak to it. To teach me something else. Paper-making is really useful because paper itself is ubiquitous. Paper can be made from any kind of vegetable matter because, when you pulp it, the water is held within the fibres. When it evaporates, all of the fibres cling together. When I make paper I take that pulp and put it in a basin of water, and it becomes this sediment. It visualises the colour and shape of the water. Pulp is suspended in the water in the same way that sediment or bacteria or algae may be suspended in a water body. When I dip a screen in and lift that paper out, it gives me an image of that turbidity; all the sediment and things happening inside the water in three dimensions. That’s a kind of a transitionary space — from water body to page. What is it to think about embodied research and to then narrow it down into writing or the two-dimensionality that happens on that kind of surface?

I’ve been trying to push that transition more since being at NIROX, to see what the limits of paper are, in terms of how it can be with water. If I build it into a sculptural form with pulp — with my hand and the water — can I think about this in terms of transcorporeality? What kind of material message can the paper provide, beyond being a substrate for writing? For example, I took some pulp and put it in the rain, which created this particular form from the pelting. Like, what is that drip — that insistent, rhythmical drip — in relation to what is happening now, where I have blocks of ice that are melting onto other pieces of paper? It’s a much slower process, so the paper has time to absorb it. What happens between these positions of wetness and dryness that can teach me something about this watery research that I’ve been doing?

SC: How does that relate to On Breathing (2022), where there’s a diaphragm function happening — this squeeze; the relationship between insides and outsides, or the various points at which they intersect and impact on one another?

NB: On Breathing, which was made in collaboration with Jeremy Bolen, was so much about what it means to visualise the interior landscape of a body in a medical museum; to think about the fragility of breathing, and breathing dust, and the relationship between the inside and outside in a medical context. I suppose there are always connections for me. Each project continues from the next. With all the projects, there’s this aspect of forcing the stakes and the subjectivity of life, into an environment in which bodies are often objectified. In this case we were thinking about those who might be hooked up to ventilators, and the stakes of insisting on breathing, but we were also thinking about Johannesburg miners who descend into the interiority of the earth and come out with particles of the underground inside them, through breathing in the deep dust. In On Breathing we made a purple plastic balloon-like diaphragm that was inflated by two vacuum cleaners that blow and then release, like a breath. We wanted to think about this relationship between the machine and the body that needs to be filled with air; this insistence that a body must be filled with air and the violence in that action. Jeremy [Bolen] and I also had an iron lung in that show, filled with eucalyptus branches. That’s what an iron lung does. It forces air into the body. That work was made right after Covid, thinking about all these bodies on ventilators — the violence of a ventilator, of insisting that a body must be inflated in a simulation of breathing in order to live. What does that life mean? Or to think about a body only in terms of its mechanics? Where is the line between the violence of medicine or the care of medicine?

In the On Breathing show we had lots of humidifiers inside the museum cabinets, making these almost terrarium wet environments. I want to bring the humidifiers into this work in some way, because humidity’s relationship to paper is such a powerful thing. My next plan is to put a humidifier under some of these papers and see how they move and warp, and then try to draw with that warping and movement. In that, there’s some forcefulness, but also the understanding that matter has some kind of forcefulness or agency in this process too.

Zanele Mashinini [ZM]: You’ve spoken about the machine forcing life. Do you feel like, in trying to suspend the paper’s drying point — by slowly hydrating it with ice or introducing a humidifier — you’re also forcing something similar?

NB: I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to keep something wet, or to let it dry and then make it wet again — what does that do? I’ve been thinking about how water moves through environments, so not just the river as we perceive it, but the less obvious ways that water moves, through transpiration and evaporation. And how it moves through us as bodies, and through everything that it contains. It is never still. There is always flow. So, continuing to rehydrate paper is like trying to insist that the water is never not in the paper. That I can enact this flow through continual wetting and observing the drying — which is the paper moving into the air from the surface. This is how life occurs. There’s lots of water that moves into something, and then it dries out and you insist on more water coming in, so there’s that forcefulness which is about life, for sure, but in a way, I’m trying to slow that down a little bit. To say, what does the stack of paper that I have become if it gets wet and then dries and then gets wet and then dries? It will become something other than a pile of paper. So what work is the water making? How is the water given space to make something from its own action?

SC: It’s a bit like how people say you have X amount of cells in your body when you’re born but by the time you’re seven or eight, your cells are all different.

NB: Yes, you’re a different person.

SC: You are but you’re not, at the same time.

NB: Yes.

SC: Not to make this a human-centric conversation, but something about what you’re saying, on a psychological level, makes me think about forms of control, ownership, possession — the ‘I think there for I am’ philosophies.

NB: A lot of the readings that I’m doing are about the problematics of a human-centric way of approaching the world — how the weather and what makes the world habitable is shifting because of human interaction, and that this shifting is due to an understanding of humans and environments as distinct or not inter-connected. Sylvia Wynter writes about the post-human; she considers humans in terms of other kinds of bodies — plant bodies, insect bodies, water bodies… How can the human body be like every other body, and in relation to those bodies as apposed to in control of them? Then the needs that the body has are its own and the brain is at the mercy of the body, rather than the body being at the mercy of the brain. That’s what I’m trying to press towards in this work, using paper, because we have such a human, controlling relationship with it. We understand ourselves in terms of knowledge and what is written down and communicated, and that becomes evidence of the thinking brain. So using it in a way that acknowledges its materiality as something that holds and then releases water — it’s a way to push towards non-human centred thinking.

SC: You used the word ‘press’, which sticks in terms of how a lot of your experiments seem to function, physically, through variations in pressure. But you also mentioned violence when it comes to the breathing body. Do you see the breathing process as violent?

NB: The breathing process isn’t violent, but when a body is no longer able to breathe, the forcing of air — the ventilator or iron lung — and the insistence that life will continue in this body, which may not be able to support it, is an act of violence. The insistence that the body will stay itself and not transition, that it wont loose subjectivity, is a violent act. When you do it in your own body, breathing is such a calming and regulating and stilling and centring act, but when we went into the Adler Museum’s archive and saw all these archaic objects designed to force air into the body, I just thought, is this ok? It feels a bit like a dam. The breathing machines hold you in a stationary, non-living/non-dying state. If you can eventually breathe on your own, the machine’s effects will have huge impacts on your body and your experience of breath. But this belief that the value of one’s life and preserving subjectivity, even when this comes with trauma, is more important is prevalent in the medical system. There is an anxiety about the body transitioning from wet to dry.

Zanele, we’ve talked about these bottles of water [collected from the dams of the Integrated Vaal River System] before and I love that they’re beautiful but for me they’re also a challenge, in a way, because they’re the opposite of everything that I’m talking about. The bottled water is being held in place so that I can look at it, think about it, and make work around it. But it’s not water anymore, when it’s contained, because water is a process. It’s movement, flow, seepage. In a way, the bottled water is like a pressed butterfly. So I feel a bit ambivalent about the idea of pressing. In one way it’s necessary pressure, urging you to feel, to be present in your body, to be aware of your position and place in relation to your environment. But in another way pressing is an insistence on holding back, in suspension, in control. Often, when water is concerned, the reasons for this control are pretty questionable — controlled water can be quantified and monetised, or used to establish a power relationship. This happens in particular in colonial contexts.

ZM: Is it problematic that it’s a scientific study, and shouldn’t it be for a better understanding?

NB: It looks like a scientific study but it’s not really. I’m not a scientist. Over there I have some test strips, but I read them like an artist. I don’t read them like a scientist would. So I’m using the image of science but it’s really not science. For some scientists this approach is annoying. Sometimes they really like it, because I’m speaking a language that they understand, or going about things in a way that they respect, but a lot of the time it’s like, ‘Well, you’re making the image but you’re not doing the science. What does that even mean?’

SC: Your experiments with paint on paper are very different to the those where you make paper. The surface on which you’re painting is almost repellent.

NB: There are a couple of different papers that I like to work with that do repel water really well. It’s the opposite of what paper usually does, which is absorb water. I find it really interesting that this kind of paper-like surface has been engineered. It’s Yupo paper, which I think is a plastic really. It repels applied water, but the water still attaches to the surface so painting is possible. It allows me to move the water around on the page, to think about the relationship of water to pigment or ink without loosing the wetness to the paper. I always resisted working with paper and water in my practice. In art school, watercolour was my worst. You put the water on the paper and the paper immediately absorbs it and holds the colour so there’s always evidence of the water and ink. It gets muddy really quick, at least in my hands, because you have to plan, if you want to do it traditionally, you cant develop your idea in real time. I need to be able to take away and add things. When I found Yupo paper I liked it for that reason. It feels more sculptural. I’m coming around to the muddy though, through this work.

But ja, these paintings on Yupo are my way of thinking about what kinds of images might have meaning or resonance in this work… These paintings are loosely based on images of stromatolites, which are early fossils of cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, was one of the first forms of plant life to exist on the planet, and is thought to be a major early oxygenator of the atmosphere which had been primarily carbon dioxide. Currently this algae blooms on polluted bodies of water, like the Vaal Dam, where the water is high in nitrates. So in a way the algae signifies massive environmental change afoot. In the studio these works are not at the centre of my thinking, but I paint them to give them a place. They’re like those bottled samples of water — I need the thoughts and ideas around them to have a physical form, present in the space. Like a note to remember. The paintings, and the water samples, are quite different from the more material experiments happening in the studio. I need this kind of antithesis in approach so that there’s a place for other kinds of making and thinking, other than my focused direction, and so that it can be like everything all at once — submersion. Many of my exhibitions are installation-based, and so I’m used to presenting work in this immersive way, but that’s also how the studio has to look while I make it.

SC: What’s the basis for your PhD and the study of water — how are you grounding that, academically?

NB: My PhD is currently titled “The Intra-active Vaal Dam: Tracking Anthropogenic Water to Johannesburg.” It’s a practice-oriented research project, formally through the Fine Art Department at UJ. I have an art history supervisor and an anthropology supervisor. That was quite specific because both fields can centre materiality as a way to make meaning. This project started because I wanted to think about the agency of the Vaal dam, which is the main source of municipal water for the Gauteng region. What does the Vaal dam want? It feels like a good question to ask a colonial structure that has used the water for utility alone. I have been reading a lot of humanities-based water theory, particularly that of Astrida Neimanis and Jamie Linton, who write about the problematics of modern water; the consideration of water as an ideally homogenous utility only. That water should be the same entity, with the same materiality, as it is in New York, Alaska, Peru, wherever; that it should be a clear liquid that we can bathe in, drink, wash our dishes in. In Johannesburg we have all these problems with water quality — pollution and so on — but we also flush everything into this same water source that we ask to be clean; the same thing that gives us life, we also use as a way to remove waste. I want to propose a different kind of relationship to water where the origins, pathways, and destinations of specific waters are part of how we know one waterway as different from another. Melody Jue writes about this as a ‘reterritorialising” of water.

In a way I want to recognise that our communities are responsible to the water we flush into, and that the pollution we create still belongs to us even if we use waterways to push it downstream. And that polluted water is still an entity with agency, even if we see it solely as a danger. So, I wanted to look at the Vaal dam because it’s the water that feeds me and my community and keeps my body alive, but it’s also highly polluted. And because the Vaal is so unmonumental. I can find old nationalist paintings of many dams in South Africa, but not the Vaal.

SC: Why?

NB: There are a few reasons. It’s not pretty, for one. It’s not between mountains. It doesn’t show itself off as this prestigious, nationalist project.

The Gariep dam is very monumental. It was used very effectively to promote the apartheid project and Afrikaner nationalism. They built it down the road from a Boer War concentration camp. It’s very much like, ‘Look at our power now!’ Like a military project. But the Vaal dam was built from British money raised before the Anglo-Boer War, and control was then transferred to the Afrikaans government, so it didn’t really fit into one kind of nationalist project. It was a British colonial project that became a national project. The Vaal dam was really built because of extraction. It was built because the mining industries in Johannesburg needed water. They had already polluted all the ground water under the town that would become a city, then needed an endless supply both for gold production and for the workforce to live by. The Vaal dam project was established by Rand Water, who were at the time a consortium of mining magnates who had the connections and funds, but were also really only interested in extractive wealth. The first government entity in Johannesburg was Rand Water. So you can see the links between extraction, money, water, and government in Johannesburg, right from the beginning. Which influences the ways in which the water is handled today, and the way that the Vaal Dam has always been seen — in terms of dirty industries and utility. So it’s part of a different history than most dams, like the Gariep or the Lesotho Highlands Project, which comes into my body of work.

SC: You’re speaking about the Vaal almost as if it was an afterthought?

NB: Kind of. It was so politically problematic. All the white authorities at the time fought it. There was never any consensus, firstly, to use the Vaal River as a source to dam. They had a lot of plans for other rivers that they wanted to dam and were like, ‘Definitely not the Vaal!’ Why? Because the Vaal is brown. The early colonial industrialists didn’t like the idea of a brown dam, because it didn’t suit the imported ideal of a lush body of water. This was a body of water that was going to need to be treated and filtered before it can become this wellspring, you know? You can’t use this as drinking water. The colour indicated that it was waste water to the white settlers. But they were also ultimately willing to dam it because it could be processed and cleared of all its natural particulate through labor and industry, and the mining companies were familiar with using labor and mechanisms to create the environment they needed.

SC: People have been drinking water since people have been people, but our ability to harness fire is a more recent phenomenon. Speaking from a place of ignorance, what did people do before boiling water? What was the process? I imagine your gut was just adjusted differently?

NB: What was the process to clean it? Prior to industries dumping in the water, you could drink anywhere. You can drink water straight from springs still, if you know where the source is.

SC: But I guess what I’m interested in is the mentality, because I’ve become accustomed to finding out whether water is safe to drink.

NB: Safety and water is really something that is culturally conditioned, even when the reality that some water may be safe for drinking but not safe for someone who doesn’t know how to swim, and another water may be toxic to humans but not plants, etc. The interesting thing is how water is perceived, and what that perception says about the person or community doing the observing. In my work I think about colonial water alot, because of its relevance to the dam and South Africa. Isabel Hofmeyr writes about the hydrocolonial. For her, the control of water — its access, cleanliness, whether it’s named as safe or dangerous — is a way of controlling the land and the people who live on it. Like when a colonising force controlled the sea-ports and the river mouths of a colonised land, it was a way of indicating ultimate power of the land and its access. But back to your question: There’s this book by Mary Douglas, called Purity and Danger (1966). She doesn’t speak about it in terms of water, but the colonial underpinnings of our feelings towards purity and danger; this idea of what is pure and what is dangerous, which I like to think about it in terms of colonial awareness of water; the sense that if water is blue we can drink it and if it’s brown we can’t, because brown means dirty and blue means clean...

SC: Is that false?

NB: It is. Blue water can also be hugely problematic and vice versa… I mean, the Vaal water that you get upstream, if it’s not being polluted, the brown water contains minerals that are good for you. Our bodies require those minerals. So this distinction between what is pure and dangerous, both in terms of what we put into the water and what we put into our bodies, but also in terms of what we swim in… Zanele and I have talked about this — do we feel good or bad about being submerged in it or taking it into our bodies? And what part of that is correct? We don’t want to go swimming in this water over here, at NIROX, and we don’t want to drink it and we know that the colour is a problem and we know why the colour is a problem but it’s interesting when you think about it in terms of the colonial project because when white settlers encountered water in South Africa for the first time they didn’t have a history of that water. They didn’t know whether the water was supposed to be that colour or not. What does ‘supposed to’ even mean? It comes with a host of implications — ‘This water is suspicious because it’s not from home’ — right? This water is from a new place and we don’t know it and so now we have to make a call on it and we’re suspicious of everything here because it’s the other and it’s primitive and it’s problematic, so then the water becomes part of that. So you look for the water that looks like your water that you had in England or France or wherever, and the other water becomes kind of dangerous beyond itself. It becomes something to control and purify.

SC: I think of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and how central the water is in that novel, as a mechanism to describe the unknown or that process of entering a new territory through the river, around which everything is incomprehensible.

NB: It’s so interesting, that thing of entering via the river. I’m working on this other collaborative project, the Orange River Project, with Sinethemba Twalo, Amy Watson, and Dee Marco. So much of what we are working through is related to the colonial transition point at Alexander Bay between the sea and the inland; how much a river becomes the point that a place is entered into from. Why is that? Because you need to stay near the water, to drink it. You can’t be far away. It’s also an easy passage. And when you go now to the Northern Cape, it’s amazing. There are farms all the way along the Orange River, in the middle of the desert. Theres this wide colonial river, with winelands alongside it. It’s still operating in the same way really.

SC: One of the other artists who was here, Abri de Swart, was also exploring a similar dynamic in the Western Cape.

NB: Yes, we’ve had lots of conversations about it.

SC: Going back to the idea of see-through water versus muddy brown water, I guess it also feels like it has something to do with control. Water that is see-through seems more ‘knowable’.

NB: Yes. There’s also a big relationship between how water looks and how it smells. It can look very clear but not smell appealing, and our bodies will tell us to be wary. So it’s not just the singular sensory — how does it look. It’s also about how it feels, how we sense it. Then there’s the impulse to control the water, which is also an impulse to say, ‘Well, you don’t know the water. The expert knows the water better than you, and so you need to listen to the authority to know what this water is.’ That feeds into the process of who has access to what water, to clean water… Then we get into the economics of water. We pay for the water in Joburg. Water is a right, but we also pay for it, and the water that is cleaner or that doesn’t get shut off as often is in areas with more wealth, so these things all reinforce themselves. What water do you wash your clothes in if the water is not coming out of your tap? What do you decide to do? Go to this water or that water? Which one do you perceive as more dangerous?

SC: Does the use of paper for you then become a kind of, not surrogate, but a way of capturing that filtering process, or that in-between state?

NB: Ja, it’s a way of trying to elicit these questions. What can we determine from the paper? When you make paper you also filter the water in a way, because the sediment in the water is taken up with the pulp. The paper becomes a slightly different colour and can start growing things, if it stays wet for long enough, which I’m trying to make happen in the controlled environment of the studio.

ZM: So you’re assuming life on paper?

NB: In a way, but I’m also trying to say, ‘This is in the paper.’ The paper is all of these things. As is the water. The water is not just itself. It’s things that I know about it and things that I don’t. It’s the waste coming from the treatment plant that is failing but it’s other things too, and organisms seen and unseen are growing off those things. Water that I determine as dangerous, for me, isn’t dangerous for everything.

ZM: At what point does the water stop becoming alive?

NB: When it’s held, I think. I was talking to a friend a few days ago, about why I’m making work about the Vaal dam, and it’s because it’s also this point of trauma for the water, like the iron lung is for the human body inside of it. It’s a holding together of something that shouldn’t be held together. The Vaal Dam is really a drain or the place where all the flushed water from industry, waste water plants, and agriculture goes, where everything that gets dumped into the river ends up, and we’re holding it there, and then we’re drinking from it. That is forcing something that is really unhealthy, not just on a level of toxicity but also in an emotional sense.

SC: You mention trauma, and I can see the overlaps in thinking about how the body retains things or how certain experiences can coagulate to become very specific to you, but I’m wondering about how you view it in relationship to the dam?

NB: A lot of traumatic things have happened in the Vaal triangle, you know? It’s an area of major vulnerability. There’s Sharpeville, and there are many dirty coal plants and steel mills. It’s one of the most polluted places to work, globally. It’s so industrial. I chat to a lot of people who work, or have worked, in steel plants, who live in Refengkotso — an informal settlement next to the Vaal near Deneysville. None of them are from the area. They’re from other parts of the country and have come to work in the plants and mills. It’s not a place that even the people who live there love, and this is an area that was flooded by the dam because it was a place where people were already vulnerable and didn’t have power to protest. If you have power you can make the dam happen somewhere else. The building of a dam often happens where the most vulnerable people are. Because those people can be moved. Their ancestral land doesn’t matter to whoever is building the dam.

But it’s also a place where all the water that is draining in doesn’t matter. It’s being used as a facility to remove waste, and all those rivers become a vehicle for that. So what does it mean for everyone who’s living along the river? What do they feel about these rivers? How do they feel about being the people who are living alongside the waste? They had been the people living alongside the wellspring, the life-giving thing, and now suddenly that’s shifted. And if you’re near the dam then you’ve been moved away and now that space that is this body of water, that provides water, is providing water to somewhere else. It’s a trauma to have your water soiled or sullied in that way. And it is also, for me, about control, because if you’ve been living along a river, the only water that you can now get, can drink, is the water that is sold to you, or from the borehole that you dig. You have to put money into water, and that becomes a form of state control.

SC: Arundhati Roy has written at length about the effects of damming in India, and the hand of the IMF, World Bank, and so on in that process. Then there’s the pouring of concrete into water systems in Gaza, or the will to create an alternative to the Suez Canal…

NB: Yes. The Israel and Palestine question is very indicative of these water politics. Israeli experts will come to South Africa and show people in small towns how to clean their dirty water. They understand, in a very powerful way, the politics of water and how instrumental it can be. What is so wild and blatant, for me, in a way that I could hardly believe — it felt like something that would happen in a story, not in reality — is the flooding of the Gazan tunnels with sea water. What does it mean to destroy the water table as a form of violence and war? You can only imagine it because Israel is such an engineered environment, that they would have the hubris to destroy land and water in that way, because they also make impossible things happen like water in the desert and farms in non-farmland. But there is a flipside of that, and it’s so traumatic. The hubris of it is extraordinary. I think a lot about how the clean water that is produced, and how much trauma is in that clean water. There are many ways of insisting on water in places where water isn’t — say, desert — and how that insistence, even though it produces life, is still super violent. Is that violence held in the water in some way? Half the water we drink in Joburg comes from Lesotho. It’s redirected to Joburg, and the damming of the Lesotho rivers fills those extraordinary valleys with water which does not belong to the Lesotho community. There’s a violence happening there, in that water is being removed to another country. What does it mean to drink that violence, to live my life on the back of that violence?

ZM: Is it not a question of capacity? Like if there’s an abundance of water in Lesotho, it makes sense to not hold the water hostage? So if a space has large bodies of water that are more than sufficient for it, is it benevolent to share the water?

NB: There was a treaty between South Africa and Lesotho to provide water to the Johannesburg region, which was instituted in the 1980s. The Lesotho Highlands Project started working in 1986. For one, there aren’t naturally large bodies of water in Lesotho. There are lots of streams and small rivers. So the Apartheid government created a treaty in the 1980s to dam the small rivers in the mountains to provide endless water to the Johannesburg region. There wasn’t a body of water before, now there is. But that water is not Lesotho’s, because South Africa built the dam. So that land is now colonised, because it’s covered in water which is owned by South Africa.

Those who live there, and who historically lived there, have been moved. These people now have to move around these big bodies of water to go to work, to take their kids to school… The water changed the environment, the weather, the area. It’s also super militarised. There’s lots of security, paid for by South Africa. Most roads in Lesotho are potholed, like country roads. Some are tarred, some are not. But the roads that go up to the Lesotho Highlands Project are perfect.

You know when you go to the Drakensburg and you hike to the top and you’re impressed with yourself, right? With your body’s efforts. There on the other side of the border in Lesotho you can drive your car up to the top of those peaks, because South Africa want access to those dams, so they keep the roads well maintained. This is also part of the treaty’s conditions: that South Africa provides tarred roads, electricity via a hydroelectric plant, monetary support for those who were moved from the flooded valleys. Those facilities are perfectly maintained, but perfect in a way that feels very like there is an overlord. Your roads are perfect, you must not complain. Your electricity is perfect, you have no electricity cuts, you must not complain. We’re doing everything that we said we would do. For me it’s super violent that that our water in Johannesburg comes from these conditions.