Io Makandal

Ophidian’s Promise comprises an urban wildlife eco-duct and a moss wall text. The eco-duct is built with historical clay bricks sourced from the area to hold the soil and endangered Soweto highveld biome grasses and plants, which create a safe passage for urban wildlife over the Jukskei river culvert.

The sculpture references the form of a snake as the symbolic more-than-human guardian of rivers. This artistic gesture invites humans back into a relationship with the waterbody and its surrounding life forms to encourage civic care over this precarious water source in a time of anthropocentric climate change. The ground-making project is the first eco-duct in Johannesburg, setting out to foreground urban ecologies and wildlife as an integral part of the urbanity that depends upon them. 

This Global Co-Commission, titled A Feral Commons, curated by Tairone Bastien, is an initiative by Alserkal Advisory in collaboration with GCDN (Global Cultural Districts Network) and supported by UAP. The commission spans three cultural districts across three continents: Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (UAE), Victoria Yards, Johannesburg (South Africa), and Kingston Creative, Kingston (Jamaica).

In developing an initiative focused on contextualising the global climate crisis and driving collective action, the Global Co-commission has used our proprietary tools to help measure the impact of public art. This includes providing a framework to audit the project’s CO2 emissions and tracking and reporting on the societal impact and afterlife of the three commissions in each of the participating districts.