Isimo Sezulu: ‘A dialogue on creative practice’, Art Resource Centre (2025)

On Thursday, 13th November 2025 Sihle Motsa hosted a discussion on her recent project, Isimo Sezulu, which translates to weather in isiZulu. Joined by contributors and artists Russel Hlongwane and Sandile Ngidi in conversation at the Art Resource Centre in Durban.

Isimo Sezulu works though epistemic and aesthetic modes to understand the social disharmony of KZN as a function of geological, industrial and ecological extraction. The project attempts to develop vernaculars for understanding and therefore articulating the ecological degradation in KwaZulu natal and grapple with racial modernity and its colonizing temporal regimes. Using time as a heuristic, it contends with the historical violence of industrialization, and the cyclical time of flooding. It takes seriously marginalized peoples’ grammars and sense- making modalities and endeavors to canonize these knowledge regimes, and to construct vernaculars from hitherto negated sites- that is from oral traditions, personal and public archives, artistic practices and sites of popular cultural production