William Kentridge Studio; Daily Maverick; An Awareness of Trees; Fynbos Talks
Good Morning
Now is the time when our team moves from a cosy place of rest to actively preparing for our spring into summer into autumn annual season of trails, mid August through May.
A Green Mountain Trail for invited journalists got us off the couch. Claire Keeton, Sunday Times feature writer, has a keen curiosity for what lies beneath the apparent. After returning from the first day’s walk ending with lunch at Paul Clüver Estate, she exclaimed that ‘this is so much more than a hike’. Claire followed with an unexpected and fun evening quiz on our favourite artists.
The art world, as we know/knew it, has been turned on its head before our very eyes. The earlier pieces of the Wildekrans Country House art collection hail from a time of ‘prestige and scarcity’ according to @hypeart. The digital natives of Gen Z have made art that is much more accessible. A change severely impacting the entire art food chain.
South African artist William Kentridge has managed the change with foresight and hard graft. While his original art works of the nineties fetch millions of rands apiece, his productions can be experienced for a few hundred rand a person. On a recent visit to the Houghton studio, I was invited to join a first viewing of a new production still in infancy. Studio Manager, Anne McIlleron, shared that William gives free reign to the studio team to play with ideas and avoid being boxed into an initial concept.‘This act of rendering, dismembering and reordering is always the essential activity of the studio. … This dismantling is not simply a technique or a strategy, but also can be a revelation of the instability of knowledge in the world, its provisionality.’ William Kentridge notebook as quoted by Sara de Beer’s STATE OF MIND in House and Leisure Autumn 2025.
For those who were unable to attend Daily Maverick’s ‘The Gathering 2025’, Associate Editor Marianne Thamm brought the house down with her brazen humour. Using an old-fashioned slideshow format with an offsite operator, she labelled herself as a middle aged woman peaking late.
First off, she wanted the audience to understand just what a billion rand looks like. This to understand the quantum of State Capture’s R57bi and Marcus Jooste’s R100bi, gained at the expense of SA. Marianne’s model is simply to imagine spending R10 000 a day for 400 years to picture only one of these billions of rands.
I left my online attendance of this gathering energised and inspired . These are some of my takeaways:
- Take control of your technology (instead of avoiding it) and then use the time saved.
- Defend TRUTH, always.
- Accept criticism – it keeps you steady and makes you stronger.
- When people fear a government it’s called a tyranny, and when a government fears its people, its called a democracy.
- Markets can remain irrational for far longer than your solvency. You get the future you invest in.
- A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Be resilient to distraction.
Alan Knott-Craig, CEO of Fibertime shared how his start-up is building and selling fiber internet to townships offering 100mbps for R5 a day, a cost ninety percent lower than his competitors. For this to work he knows that large amounts of vouchers must be sold. The plan is to put fibre in every home, every shack and every dwelling. When asked why Fibertime is not including the leafy suburbs, he responded that ‘it would be like taking a laxative and Immodium at the same time’. I found that use of analogy very funny.
At the end of this week, curator Andrew Lamprecht and artist Jill Trappler will take a small group of thinkers, creatives and artists through a weekend retreat here at Wildekrans Country House – AN AWARENESS OF TREES. While the studio time seems to be fully booked, we have space for a few to listen in on South African National Gallery curator Andrew Lamprecht’s wisdom on trees in art and literature through time.
It is that gorgeous garden time when head gardener Barry Gould Architect struggles to leave home for his architectural practice at Peregrine Farm Stall. While building design is his first love, gardening comes a close second. This year, alongside our annual charity garden show, Green Mountain’s Andreas Groenewald will share his knowledge on plant identification in a few one hour sessions. Email us to reserve a seat – small informal gatherings in The Barn over country style tea. Elgin Open Gardens – weekends 1,2 and 8, 9 November.
With some opportunities for you to join our slackpacking trails in the months ahead, I meant to write about these. Time has run out so I will say goodbye with a few lines by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Few people know how to take
a walk. The qualifications are
endurance, plain clothes, old
shoes, an eye for nature, good
humor, vast curiosity, good
speech, good silence and
nothing too much.”
With love
