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The WEF Nexus – interconnections between water, energy and food – has largely been the subject of research attention in relation to policy, governance and intersectoral engagement. In South Africa, and globally, researchers have concentrated on technical and technocratic questions, emphasising the quantification of resources. Communities, livelihoods and local environments have rarely figured in this work, whether due to perceived irrelevance, lack of interest, or by being ignored. The WEF Nexus approach makes certain assumptions about the nature of the state – it is seen as an instrument of delivery, and delivery failures are seen as lapses of coordination and communication, rather than as outcomes of struggles over power and resources. WEF Nexus also often fails to account for, let alone foreground, questions of the environment and land, including struggles of control over and access to land as central to WEF resource security. Hence the need to understand WEF outcomes as part of a broader political economy. Eco-Imagining engages with this technocratic literature from the point of view of people’s lived reality, to challenge and enrich existing frameworks. Using a transdisciplinary approach, and inclusive and community-based approaches, we examine issues around water, energy and food security, and changes in these domains that people experience in the context of social, economic, environmental and climate change. Juxtaposition and Value brings together environmental and biological scientists, humanities scholars and the creative arts.

The exhibition and colloquium reflects our concern with inequality and insecurity, now and historically, as these affect access to water, food, energy, and other resources such as land. In the exhibition of our own work, and the photographs, prints and other art work, and the ethnographic items we have selected, we juxtapose images, compare and contrast; through this approach, we draw attention to the differences in values between communities and the state. The methods we have used in the projects highlight our approach to knowledge production, raising questions too in terms of how values determine the direction of policies and programmes related to basic resources. The exhibited material includes expressive and representational media by professional and community artists and by people in their everyday lives – painting, printing, drawing, photography, video, sound, and domestic objects. We include posters of two doctoral research projects which provide examples of juxtaposition, and the lack of value given to equity when people lack resources. We include also community artwork from another doctoral projects.