This short experimental video essay serves as the opening chapter to an ongoing research inquiry into land, and human intervention. It begins from memory: growing up on a mountain, surrounded by mountains, where autumn meant watching fires appear across the slopes. Many were deliberately set; burning dry brown grass to encourage the return of green pasture,sustaining cattle and reducing the distance herds needed to roam. Destruction,as a strategy for renewal.Threaded through these recollections is a children’s song once sung in response to the approaching flames: “There is a fire on the mountain, run, run, run.” The line repeats, looping until boredom interrupts it or until the fire edges close enough, raising a different kind of alarm. The video lingers in this space between play and threat, ritual and fear.Through image, repetition, and reflection, the work explore show land regenerates itself and how human intervention both disrupts and collaborates with that process. Fire becomes a gesture. At once violent and regenerative, stretching across the terrain, accelerated by wind, reshaping what it touches. This introductory chapter situates memory as methodology,asking what it means to participate in cycles of destruction that promise renewal,and examining the uneasy symbiosis between landscape and those who inhabit it.
Photography by Guillaume Baeriswyl
Photography by Guillaume Baeriswyl
go slow, you’ll see better is a journey of contemplation and transitioning between opposing states [of being]. Revealing a landscape interspersed with vibrant colours of magenta and pink, this represents a bridge between excitement and calmness, chaos, and order. The shift in saturation mirrors the ever-changing nature of emotions, experiences, and personal narratives. Driving by and shooting out the window, the landscape becomes blurred and unblurred, evoking the sense of in-betweenness, which can prompt the feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity, clarity, and vagueness. go slow, you’ll see better is everywhere and nowhere, collapsing both the temporal and the spatial.
Siyanda Marrengane is a Eswatini born visual artist based in Johannesburg.
Kuba semkhatsini is a SiSwati phrase that can be translated as being caught in the middle of conflicting states of being, situations, conditions and more. Siyanda is interested in the notion of the in-between (kuba semkhatsini), a central component in her practice that encompasses personal and collective narratives and experiences. These are subsequently explored as ways of questioning, challenging and falsifying existing hegemonies.Unpacking and translating these through video, sound and installation, to create ambiguous spaces that are both imagined and real.
©2026 Siyanda Marrengane