RESERVOIR presents a new a solo exhibition by Bella Knemeyer

Bella Knemeyer in studio, photo courtesy of RESERVOIR

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If you're in Cape Town be sure to visit the exhibition titled Here, there and everywhere, which opens Thursday, 13 February 2025, and will run until the end of March 2025.

The promise of repair, text by Hedley Twidle

At some point in the last ten years, human-made things – infrastructure, concrete, metals, asphalts, aggregates, plastics and all the rest – began to exceed the combined weight of all biomass on earth. Exactly where you place the crossover point depends: are we counting only things constructed (bridges, roads, buildings)? Or also the waste left behind after their making: mine dumps, tailings, landfill, scrapyards, piles of rubble? In 1900 (scientists estimate) human-made stuff clocked in at 3% of organic matter (everything from trees to tundra, cattle to plankton). Today human civilization weighs in at 1,1 trillion metric tonnes (the more conservative estimate). A million million tonnes, that is, pressing down on the earth’s crust, present and future.

In Bella Knemeyer’s work, panels of mulched paper are scored with fine striations or imbued with a delicate mesh. On shelves in her studio are pebbles of granite, dirty whitish and speckled with black grains. Or at least this is what I took them for, until I pick one up and find it unaccountably light. Also formed of papier-mâché, mixed with slate chips picked up from the railway that runs to Simonstown (where her studio is located, looking over the station, the naval dockyards and the glittering metal sheet of False Bay beyond). There are also delicate arrangements of wire with fulcrums, counterweights, like scales or seesaws; and cylinders (also paper) hanging down like those from an old pendulum clock. The combined mass of this entire body of work, I imagine, would be negligible. Even when including the small grey panels pitted with imperfections and scored with wire: portable diptychs and triptychs of concrete that remind you just how beautiful this material can be.

‘Materials change shape as they travel from geological deposit or forest or factory and design project to landfill’ – so writes Jane Hutton in Reciprocal Landscapes, her attempt to move back and forth between distant production site and designed landscape, to trace itineraries of the things that make up our profoundly altered world: ‘Where did they come from? What are the social and ecological conditions of their manufacture? Who made them? What is left in their place?’ The exponential growth of the built environment across the 20^th and 21^st centuries – an irruption of technosphere into biosphere – has happened largely within living memory (particularly following the so-called Great Acceleration post-second world war, with its large-scale adoption of concrete, crude oil derivatives and asphalt). We live within its consequences at every turn; yet somehow it is hard to believe, to imagine or take as entirely real.

The unthinkable weight of this world historical process – its complex and unceasing flows of extraction, fabrication, deconstruction, beneficiation, displacement, dumping and disposal – haunts Knemeyer’s work, but in a subtle, sublimated way. The quiet delicacy of her panels and maquettes exist in an inverse or indexical relation to the flows they point to: the frenzied demolition and construction in capitalist core nations or growing urban hubs.

Bella Knemeyer, Pine (detail), 2025, Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas, 159.5 x 106cm, R70,000.00 ex. VAT, ENQUIRE

The paper which serves as her primary medium has often been sourced from municipal dumps or other places of disposal and discard: sites dotted all along the southern axis leading from city centre to the end of the line. For example: the sheets used to blank out windows in buildings undergoing renovation or ‘renewal’ (Woodstock and Salt River). The kind of gunk or bumf (n. useless or tedious printed material) that clogs postboxes and recycling depots in the southern suburbs. The lifespan records of a Mazda Hatchback mulched with pigments, to quote the title of an earlier work, a mesmerising colour field of dark blue which (like all these panels of raked and repurposed cellulose pulp) is minimalist from a distance, but hyperactive up close. Printer manuals, many of them (apparently); audits, apology letters, betting stubs – all of it goes into buckets to be mulched, trowelled, scored, dried. Its histories and provenance are at once ever-present but illegible, transmuted from the lexical to the wordless, from informational to notional, gestural.

Bella Knemeyer solo exhibition, Installation shot, courtesy of RESERVOIR

The Simonstown museum’s community archive donated newsprint from the False Bay Echo (a resonant name for a local rag). For years the museum has clipped stories related to residents displaced and removed from the area. Knemeyer then collected and mulched the leftover newsprint, the negative space, the remainder: The background, context and everyday noise surrounding loss and displacement, as one of her captions puts it: There is no place here without its enduring hollows.

Out the window of her studio and across the naval precinct, she pointed to a series of barely visible lines in a kloof beyond the town. This is the remnant of Luyolo location, built up on dry stone wall terraces by the labourers who had constructed the railway line south, then settled here when it reached its terminus. Luyolo was dismantled in 1965, even before the far more ambitious removals of the Group Areas Act attempted to unmix this creolised port town. Lightly scored lines on a hillside, where fynbos has covered over the terraces, but will never efface them. Landscape, she remarks, has such a long memory.

Bella Knemeyer, This world should be more wonderful, 2025, Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas, 130 x 100cm , R60,500.00 ex. VAT, ENQUIRE

Knemeyer’s background is in landscape architecture and urban studies. For several years she was a researcher at the African Centre for Cities, and it was here that I first encountered her work as a tracer of rubble. Working as a kind of ‘geographical detective’ – via archives, heritage reports, fieldwork, photography – she tracked where the physical remains of District Six and (other sites of violent demolition) had ended up within the larger city. As bulldozers levelled tens of thousands of people’s homes, as elevated flyovers punched through the urban fabric, vast quantities of rubble were generated, sorted, then redistributed. Landfill is what goes to dump sites; infill gets used again, silently.

Between holes eight and ten on Milnerton golf course, for example, you can find salt-and-pepper speckled granite curbstones and bits of asphalt that might once have been Hanover Street. Golf carts trundle past half-buried floor tiles stuck to globs of cement. Lichen is growing on concrete chunks of with bits of rebar sticking out. These inadvertent monuments merge into the rough alongside the vlei: the debris of apartheid destruction used as infill between fairways and greens, as landscaping for sites of white leisure.

This ‘heritage rubble’ allegedly also found its way into the River Club development along the Liesbeeck; into the Granger Bay extension near the Waterfront; and most probably into the Ben Schoeman dock of Cape Town’s industrial port. In following ‘the teenage memory of a former District Six resident, who witnessed rubble being carted down to the old Woodstock beach’, Knemeyer’s research led her to this 1970s harbour extension development, in which the Table Bay container terminal was created by reclaiming, or rather obliterating, the old Woodstock beach coastline. Portions of infill material are also entombed in the vast concrete arms of the dock, poured on land taken back from the sea.

The 20^th century is, she remarks, interlaced with and enabled by reinforced concrete. It was concrete set over grids and meshes of reinforcing steel bars (rebar) that allowed the cantilever and the flyover. That allowed concrete to stretch and span, to curve in space like a modernist sculpture, ‘to become airborne’. Today, however, many of these grand projects are reaching the end of their lifespan. They are fraying or spalling (a technical term for the splintering or chipping of concrete).

Bella Knemeyer, Pine (detail), 2025, Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas, 159.5 x 106cm, R70,000.00 ex. VAT, ENQUIRE

The fine supporting mesh threaded through Knemeyer’s recent work evokes this steel scaffold even as it becomes (on this much smaller scale) something other. More like gauze for the bandaging of wounds. The small rents and tears seem to register the slightest pressure, pull or torque; but also an attempt to stitch and suture back together. In her thinking about architecture, she works with imprints of use and habitation that escape or exceed the modernist blueprint. Worn stairwell joins and handrails, indentations and scuffs that speak of an absent human trace. Her small paper pilings evoke mining stopes or the ultimate heaviness of precast concrete sleepers; but also that childhood game, pick-up sticks, where you must carefully extract bits of a tangled structure without disturbing the rest, or causing a collapse.

This relation between the weight of history compressed within the medium and the wordless openness, even emptiness of the resulting work might be read in several ways.

Is it that matter remains stubbornly imbued with the past, even when this might not be conscious, explicit or even legible? Is it that the surfaces and substrates of this city (as with so many other cities) are balanced between the incessantly memorial and the blithely ahistorical? That we live somehow suspended between memory and forgetting, between an obsessive return to, but also a scandalous forgetting of the past?

The material obduracy of the work eludes easy sentiment or easy indictment; it also escapes the enervating and predictable sense of heritage that by now attaches to so many places. It intervenes not within the designated cultural precincts but amidst the bric-a-brac, the workaday urban fabric (the car park of Food Lover’s Market on Roeland Street, she tells me, was once the sorting depot for District Six rubble). In her tracing and remaking of forgotten dry-stone walls, Dutch postal stones, uprooted curbs, Knemeyer is rooting around in heritage rubble (ignored, unseen, undigested) rather than heritage squares (easily visited, explained, consumed).

Nothing of this can really be fixed, but still there exists (this seems to be the tacet invitation of the work) the question of repair. It is a word ‘more tentative, more humble’, Teju Cole remarks, than ‘fix’, the one-and-for-all fix: ‘Repair sounds to me like a word that has been feminized because we think of somebody stitching, somebody weaving, somebody making something carefully with their hands and making do.’ 

Not wanting to rehearse an overused past, but unable to ignore it; not wanting to add to the material burden but unable to cease making, Knemeyer’s is a practice of, as she puts it, ‘trying to build up to nothing’, balanced between the irreparable and the promise of repair.

February 2025

Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movement. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2020.

Elaine R. Hartwick, ‘Towards a Geographical Politics of Consumption,’ Environment and Planning 32 (2000): 1177–92.

Knemeyer, B. Refractions of Rubble - Tracing imbued building material flows across Cape Town. Conference Paper for [Paper presentation]. Ecotones Conference #7 - Reconfiguring, Repurposing the City: Urban Ecotones in the Global South University of Cape Town, Cape Town. (28-30 October 28-30, 2021)