RESIDENCY

CURRENT

Annegret Affolderbach

February 2025

East German born Annegret Affolderbach is an ecological artist. Her thought-provoking works awaken us to the unexpected rooted in our ecologies, cultures and lifestyles. In site-responsive collaborations with nature, she weaves together sensory artworks and experiences. Endangered and culturally significant ecologies are the sites where her works originate and often return to; a circular act that honours people, place and the cycles of life.

For over two decades, Annegret has lived and worked across the global North and South, creating works addressing themes of water, sustainability, over-consumption and cultural transformation. Her background in pioneering sustainable fashion combined with her experience as an editor and curator, gives make her a distinctive voice in the fields of art, fashion, culture and sustainability.

In 2023, she created site-responsive installations and ceremonial performances with clay seed vessels during a residency & collaboration with Gallery Momo and Momo Outskirts, near NIROX. During her residency she will create new artworks inspired by the landscape surrounding NIROX and by ingredients she was gifted by some of her loves to inspire her residency. These works build on her ongoing project “we used to lay in meadows dreaming”, where daydreaming is considered an art form; a sensory act of detangling from the traffic of our digital highways; an act of alignment; a moment for stillness, a form of deep rest and restoration.

RESIDENCY SPACES AND SERVICES

COOLROOM

UPSTAIRS STUDIO

STUDIO

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WORKSHOP

LOUNGE/DINING

COTTAGE

LOUNGE

MUSIC ROOM / STUDIO

Accommodation consists of a two bedroom double-story house facing north overlooking the Sculpture Park, with a large double-volume studio, mezzanine work space, lounge, dining and entertainment facility. Adjoining the house is an open-fronted sculpture workshop and a second studio.

A separate self-contained 2-bedroom cottage facing west overlooks the water, sheltered from the afternoon sun by aged Bushwillows.

Residencies are fully serviced with meals prepared by Maria and her team in the house kitchen, good 'rural' wifi, and assistance with sourcing materials, building and making to good standards by our management, ground staff and resident carpenter.

A short walk across the lawns of the Park is the Coolroom Complex, a large multi-functional workshop/studio, a Screening Room with cinema seating, a small studio and curator’s office.

The Sculpture Parks’ 30 hectare garden is shared with the public on weekends and with pre-arranged visitors during the week. Residents’ privacy is protected, but it is in the nature of the Foundation’s purpose to encourage engagement.

The restaurant, ‘... And then there was fire’ is open to the public. Residents are encouraged to enjoy its active program of music, performance, culinary-school, yoga, talks, poetry, fashion and related activities; to be part of Bernardo and Manu’s passion for food and the exulted life we hope to bring to South Africans and visitors from afar.

RESIDENCY SPACES AND SERVICES