When You Enter Water

If a river had a voice, what song would it sing?

Sound and visual performance | Adele van Heerden & Botanicas

A river brings life, colour and beauty, ever-shifting the landscape around it with its roaring and gushing. We are trying to find the river's song through blurring the lines between what is reality and what is synthetic, reconstructing natural elements using biomimicry. Creating a new world — as a concept — using parts and references from the old world — reality — we present the concept as a third reality.

Three self-built instruments — a River, Waterfall and Pond — will be used to create a watery sonic landscape, forming part of an experimental ambient music set. Adele van Heerden will play an instrument using her brush and paint; Botanicas will accompany and conduct the movements and flow of the evening. Both aim to shift perspectives of reality, offering an audio-visual container for the audience to rest and reflect.

Expect a night of magic and wonder, where colour and sound overlap into a harmonious weaving of real and conceptual worlds.

The work of Adele van Heerden, a Cape Town-based visual artist, is informed by the experience of a particular site, with a keen interest in the careful observation and study of surface, light, reflection and fluidity. She took part in a residency at Nirox from April to May 2026. During her time there, she was occupied with researching and observing the water systems in the area. She created large-scale paintings which were transformed into an installation on site. Van Heerden used the waters surrounding the Cradle of Humankind and Johannesburg as a lens to reflect on perspectives of both external landscapes and their metaphorical internal counterparts. This research supports the development of her Cubicle exhibition taking place at Everard Read during HEAT 2026.

Botanicas, a Cape Town-based ambient sound and installation artist working at the intersection of ecological systems and sonic perception, joined Van Heerden at Nirox to connect with the landscape on a sonic level. Drawing on things like real-time plant data, Botanicas designs custom instruments that transmute organic processes into immersive soundscapes which explore the hidden acoustic dimensions of forests, oceans, and the living systems that connect them.

Together they are creating a series of field recordings and generating a composition in combination with synthetic sounds in response to this environment.

Van Heerden and Botanicas started working together in 2023, when they collaborated on a soundscape for Van Heerden's exhibition Mirror at 131 A Gallery. Botanicas played the soundscape live in the gallery for the duration of the opening, and the recording was made available to listeners afterwards.