Art and philosophy meet in Horizon 2055’s call for a sustainable future

Nicki Rayepen created and directed the live performance ‘The Last Call of Mother GQ‘. Images: Bruce Gordan

A performance, The Last Call from Mother GQ, set the tone with a powerful fusion of poetry, song, dance and music at the launch on Thursday 30 October.

It embodied the themes at the heart of Horizon 2055: sustainability, identity and social cohesion in a rapidly changing world.

Horizon 2055 is a year-long research and engagement project of the SARChI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa (ISCIA), led by Professor Andrea Hurst.

Beatrice van Wyk and Danica Ridgway’s mixed media installation, ‘Hope-ish’ depicted a flock of birds crafted from found plastics, paper, and wire

It combined academic inquiry with creative exploration through online seminars and three immersive “City (E)scape” journeys across Gqeberha, culminating in the current multimedia exhibition. 

“At its heart, ‘Horizon 2055’ asks what it means to think sustainably — not only in environmental terms, but also in cultural, social and imaginative ones,” said Prof Hurst. “What kind of future are we consciously or unconsciously creating together?”

From dialogue to experience

‘Blind Among the Rubbish’, created by Nicki Rayepen, was both an installation and a live performance at ‘Horizon 2055: City (E)Scapes’

Horizon 2055 began early in 2025 with a series of 19 online seminars featuring local and international speakers.

These talks examined how the arts can enable us to imagine the future, and how philosophical reflection can guide ethical responses to the crises of our time.

However, the project did not stop at theory.

“We didn’t want ‘Horizon 2055’ to exist only as an academic dialogue,” Prof Hurst explained. “We wanted it to be rooted in lived experience, grounded in the textures of our city.”

To that end, the team — including postdoctoral fellows Dr Gary Koekemoer and Dr Emma Hay, with creative facilitator Erin Smith — designed three immersive “City (E)scape” journeys across Nelson Mandela Bay.

The itinerary, curated by Dr Koekemoer,  took participants into industrial zones, conservation areas, beaches, factories and community initiatives, connecting environmental and social realities.

“These weren’t escapes in the sense of avoiding reality,” Prof Hurst said of the journeys. “Quite the opposite. They were deep dives into the fabric of our city, into our own environment.”

Participants were then invited to create a response — through painting, sculpture, performance, music, writing or academic analysis — which culminated in the exhibition City (E)scapes, which ran at Bird Street Gallery until Tuesday 5 November.

Art as research, research as art

Dr Gary Koekemoer’s assemblage of found objects – mostly plastic pollution picked up on three Nelson Mandela Bay beaches – was one of the pieces on show in ‘Horizon 2055: City (E)Scapes’ at the Bird Street Gallery

Dr Koekemoer’s Strandloper 2025: Hoisted by our own petard, a two-metre-high assemblage of found objects collected from three Nelson Mandela Bay beaches, was one of the exhibits.

“We use plastic for virtually everything, but we cannot eat it. Much of it lands in the sea and then is washed ashore, slowly decaying into microscopic bits,” said Dr Koekemoer.

“Strandlopers of the past could live off nature’s coastal offerings, today’s strandloper could not. Our human waste is our petard. It’s strangling nature and us. We’re incredibly ingenious, but blind to our collective impact. A walk on our beaches is a visceral prompt to rethink our place in nature.”

Built from discarded fishing nets, ropes, bottles and an aircraft tyre, the piece reflects how ingenuity and waste have become entwined. At its centre lies a perlemoen shell — the “heart of Strandloper” — symbolising the fragile persistence of life amid pollution.

A transdisciplinary collaboration

Dr Glenn Holtzman wrote the music for, and enacted, an ancestral ritual trance dance

For Dr Jacqui Lück, speaking on behalf of the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the opening of the exhibition, Horizon 2055 epitomises the power of the humanities to bridge disciplines and address urgent questions.

“It’s a powerful and compelling project,” she said. “It demonstrates transdisciplinarity — the critical, reflective strength of philosophy married with the imaginative, expressive power of the arts.”

Dr Lück described the work as “the humanities at work” in the way they responded to enduring social inequities, fragmentation and ecological collapse.

“In this project, we didn’t just go and hug trees and apologise to them, but also listened deeply — to the trees and to the people who are living on this planet. We think with care and create with purpose, and we act with conscience.”

Engagement as scholarship

At the opening of Horizon 2055, from left, Harsheila Riga, Professor Andrea Hurst, Professor Pamela Maseko and Dr Jacqui Lück

Speaking on behalf of the University’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Internationalisation, Professor Pamela Maseko commended the Chair’s egalitarian approach.

“Through the philosophical exploration of the present and the creative imagination of possible futures, ‘Horizon 2055’ seeks to form an egalitarian community of participants, researchers, educators, emerging scholars and artists,” she said.

PhD music student Lindokuhle Gushu portrayed Mother GQ at the opening of the ISCIA exhibition ‘Horizon 2055: City (E)Scapes’

“This Chair exemplifies transdisciplinary engagement, drawing together philosophy, visual arts and social-ecological systems research. It reminds us that our crises — climate collapse or fluctuations, inequality, cultural fragmentation — cannot be solved in disciplinary silos.”

Prof Maseko emphasised that socially engaged scholarship means learning with, not learning about, communities. “This project cultivates intellectual rigour and moral imagination — the very capacities we need to change the world.”

Calling Horizon 2055 “a laboratory of the human spirit”, she said research should be ethical and creative: “It can bind communities together while confronting the most difficult questions of existence.”

Imagination and community

Horizon 2055 comprised a series of public events — a seminar, exhibition walkabout, poetry readings, an academic colloquium and a film discussion — each extending the dialogue between art and inquiry.

“What you see at this exhibition is the collective voice of thinking, feeling and imagining together,” said Prof Hurst. “It’s a glimpse into what becomes possible when imagination and community meet.”

For Nelson Mandela University, the project encapsulated a vision of research that serves society: collaborative, creative and conscious of the human condition.

• Horizon 2055 City (E)scapes was on show from 30 October to 4 November 2025 at the Bird Street Gallery, 20 Bird Street, Central, Gqeberha.

The flower reserve at Van Staden’s was one of the destinations on the three journeys