The Visitor Centre (2016-2018), created as part of my PhD research achieved at the University of Cape Town in 2020, presents a mobile hub aimed at encouraging humans to respond with empathy and care towards nonhuman species. The Visitor Centre I and II were presented as a series of events in the City of Tshwane, and focused particularly on the wild and semi-wild species that occur in neighbourhoods and homes in this biodiverse environment. This relational artwork was conceived as a response to the limitations of natural history museums as their displays tend to objectify nonhumans species and distance humans from nonhuman nature. As a mobile museum that asked participants to touch and handle objects, the artwork appealed to the bodily responses of visitors in order to foster a sense of connection. The Visitor Centre responds to the limitations of natural history museums, by being mobile, by its flexible and evolving content and by its emphasis on oral accounts of particular and personal experiences with wildlife.

My thesis, The Visitor Centre: artistic reconfigurations of multispecies relationships in an urban environment (2020), is available on the OpenUCT repository.

 A book chapter, Encounters with The Visitor Centre: Art and interspecies relationships in Animal encounters: Kontakt, Interaktion und Relationalität edited by A Böhm and J Ullrich was published in 2019.

View The Visitor Centre (2015) video artwork and The Visitor Centre I at Tswaing on YouTube. Access to a video of The Visitor Centre II events is available upon request.

 This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF)’s Unique Grant 84414, and by the School of the Arts: Visual Arts, the Research Office at the University of Pretoria. Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the author, and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard.