pronunciation: /məˈtɪəriəl ˈselvɪdʒɪz/ noun (used with a singular verb)
1. A radio-making project examining materiality through Global Majority First Nations perspectives, with a focus on Southern and West Africa.
Etymology: From material + selvedges (plural of selvedge, also spelled selvage), from Middle English self + edge. The term performs deliberate wordplay with salvage (from Old French salvage, meaning "to save"), invoking both the textile concept of a self-finished fabric edge and the act of recovering suppressed knowledge systems.
A Cartography of the Invisible Conversation 04.12.2024 Text 27.06.2025
Three hundred kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, the chambered dolomite of the Echo Caves rests within one of the continent’s oldest geological formations. Formed when the African continent still belonged to Gondwana, the rock predates the earliest human gestures; before the idea of drawing could contain what has always exceeded its bounds.
In this subterranean architecture, certain stalactites produce tonal responses when struck. The cave functions beyond containment, participating actively, transforming stone into instrument and space into vocal cavity. These responses travel far beyond the cave’s mouth, activating a spatial memory that continues without dependence on sight.
Evidence suggests that the first artists in the region returned repeatedly to specific chambers, and the sonic responses embedded in the architecture contributed largely to this return. This brings to light that contrary to popular perception, drawing is not a 2D endeavour. “The creation of rock art was combined with performance” stated Neil Rusch, in reflecting on recent bioacoustics studies from Wits University. Sound, in this context, operates as both index and collaborator, calling out and being answered through the act of marking.
Early drawing emerges as a relational process. Tim Ingold’s suggestion that lines act as living trajectories becomes particularly relevant here. Some marks can be understood only through activation in space, breath and movement.
Sitting in Johannesburg, we acknowledge that although these responses remain beyond hearing, they continue to shape how drawing is remembered, understood and carried forward. Perhaps this knowledge rests in the ground upon which we walk.
I
“We are all ecologies,” says East German-born and Johannesburg-based, Annegret Affolderbach. Practising as an ecological artist, cultural producer, and futurist, Annegret found her start as a dancer. The language of sound and movement was etched into her body from childhood.
What began as choreography now extends into a method for recognising environmental intelligence. Today, her practice which is still shaped by that same sensibility, engages South African topographies in their full breadth. From attuning to their sounds and frequencies to moving in accordance with their rhythms, she describes her work as being “made from
ingredients gathered in the landscape; to form part of a life-size sketchbook.”
This approach reveals how movement, perception and non-human systems communicate across a shared field. Her shift from studio to open terrain suggests a broader recognition: listening, like drawing, requires attentiveness that is embodied and contextual. In her case, Annegret asks what it means to draw with a landscape rather than upon it. If an entire ecosystem becomes the surface, then the marks consist of pressure changes, tonal shifts and patterned responses.
Regardless of undertaking, her work begins with listening. This involves porous presence. The focus moves away from representation and turns toward how the body absorbs, contains and reflects the knowledge
expressed by its environment.
II
In 2023, Annegret was commissioned to create a Daydream Experience in the Fynbos ecology of the Cape Floral Kingdom. She selected twenty people from around the world to be placed into this site for five days. Prior to their arrival, she spent seven days alone, inhabiting the area with the native flora and having one-on-one exchanges with the “intelligences” as she calls them. A period of time that served to soften the boundary between individual and biome.
“I started finding myself chatting with the plants... and it wasn't until day three that I noticed: This wasn't a one-way conversation.”
That shift marked a threshold at which the anthropocentric ear had no choice but to yield.
“Suddenly I realised I'm not hearing this literally, but it's very clear to me. This is some kind of exchange of frequency and sound that is happening.”
John Berger knew drawing as an urgent activity, a two-way process where the drawer becomes drawn. The Fynbos drew Annegret into a deeper kind of attention, one that revealed itself through presence.
She felt the compulsion to record the frequencies and bioacoustics with her tools, and even in doing so, she knew that “it wasn't about the frequency I could read on my tools, it was about the invisible.”
Recording instruments captured some fragments, yes. However, she clarifies that these offer residue of interaction, because the depths of the exchange exist beyond the scope of what technology preserves.
III
Only two weeks after Annegret’s residency in the historic land, the whole landscape burned down in a wildfire.
“It completely burned to the ground.
Acres,
Hectares and hectares, not acres,
Hectares of land
in ashes.”
Now, the recordings have become a living memory of an ecosystem, capturing its last full breaths.
For Annegret, this is where the work begins.
Sound becomes a way of remembering, of staying in conversation with what once was. In these recordings, Annegret is not interested in technical fidelity. She is carving a mode of translation, a line serving as a refusal to betray what has been lost.
IV
The frequencies and bioacoustics Annegret captures are later brought into other settings. They are sometimes projected as light, felt as reverberating surfaces, and sometimes seen through video; but always with sound.
These transmissions, as she calls them, are not fixed. They move across surfaces and onto bodies. When someone walks through them, with the sound affecting the surface’s sway, light clings momentarily to skin or cloth.
In these moments, the body becomes a vessel through which lost landscapes find temporary residence. The marks land in perception rather than on paper. They appear and dissolve.
They are carried by altered awareness.
Annegret notes that placement is crucial.
“The intentionality of where things are presented,” she says, “is about creating the unexpected, placing these important conversations into spaces where they are not had.”
V
We remain some distance from the dolomite chambers. Still, that distance collapses in the recognition that sound persists. The interval between source and reception becomes secondary to the attentiveness that allows connection to reappear. Some drawings stay unseen.
This is drawing as relation. It transmits across time, space and perception. Its presence is not determined by what is left behind. Rather, it lives through what remains in motion.
There’s something about sound, she says, that allows the invisible to speak.