Winners: Social Impact Arts Prize 2020

WORDS Michaela Stehr

Three projects have been awarded the Social Impact Arts Prize for 2020.

The winning projects, namely Hello Wolk!, Tears Become Rain and PLANTed, each aim to address social challenges in a creative way, with a focus on the small Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet.

Designed by studioMAS and Gustav Praekelt, Hello Wolk! focuses on water scarcity. The project initially starts as an artwork providing an amount of water and connects the community via digital platforms. The artwork, inspired by the Khoi-Khoi and San is built in the form of a water-collecting rain cloud, which will in turn water a garden beneath the structure. Symbolising the digital cloud, it also offers Wi-Fi for community-based information. Local women in the town will receive code learning to update the cloud with information for the community.

PLANTed by Lorenzo Nassimbeni, Andrew Brose and Casper Lundie highlights the loss of knowledge based on traditional and indigenous medicinal plants and underrepresented cultural disciplines. The project engages the community in the production of a built structure for designers, artists and locals to exhibit personal plant knowledge and information while recognising the aspects of tech, craft, local food, architecture and plant knowledge not shared in the community.

Tears Become Rain by David Brits and Raiven Hansmann is a mass choir project created in response to a climate in crisis. The aim of the music group is to inspire hope and a sense of togetherness by singing for rainfall. Paying homage to the choral history of the area, the project uses song as an educational tool around water. The story follows a young San child in the time of a drought. His tears of grief turn into raindrops and rejuvenate the soils.

Started by the Rupert Art Foundation and the Rupert Museum in 2019, the Social Impact Arts Prize calls for creative ideas that will positively impact the communities in which they are created.

“All of the finalists demonstrated extremely responsible and authentic arts-based ideas that could address pressing social challenges creatively,” says Hanneli Rupert, Co-Director and Chairwoman of the Social Impact Arts Prize 2020. “In inspiringly diverse ways, they presented workable solutions that could influence, affect or simply make us more aware of societal conditions in our world today.”

For more information and to see the development of the projects, visit socialimpactartprize.org.