The Impossible Garden: A Gathering marks the beginning of a series of interventions curated by the 2026 Zeitz MOCAA and University of the Western Cape (UWC) Museum Fellows in response to IMPRINT, the artist-led studio residency and publishing atelier.
A two-part gathering held on Saturday, 28 November, it invites the public to witness The Impossible Garden, a public installation that emerges from a garden once imagined for the site but unable to be realised within the spatial, institutional, and practical constraints of its development. Indigenous to the Cape, the single water berry tree stands defiantly beneath the track shed as a way of thinking about cultivation—of ideas, practices, ways of being—within and outside of institutional constraints.
Part One of the gathering is open to the public with the Fellows’ discussion of The Impossible Garden. The panel conversation, moderated by Zeitz MOCAA and UWC Fellow Mawadah Nofal, brings together Ziko Petse of Wolff Architects and Kim Reynolds and Luyanda Zindela of (B)and(W)idth collective to discuss the intersection of independent publishing and creole gardening as forms of collective knowledge-making that have historically flourished in the margins of institutional control, drawing on scarcity, improvisation, experimentation, and inherited knowledge to make room for what official structures cannot or will not accommodate. This panel will be an interactive conversation where the audience will be encouraged to share their thoughts.
Part Two of the gathering is a closed workshop capped at twenty participants. Co-curated by Climate Lounge founders Sarah Farrel and Dela Gwala, alongside the Zeitz MOCAA and UWC Fellows, the workshop What We Make Possible invites participants to step beyond the immediate pressures and precarities of working in the arts and other sectors and articulate their hopes and dreams for those who will come after them. In relation to The Impossible Garden, the workshop asks: if the conditions of the garden could not be realised within the constraints of the institution, how might we imagine an arts ecosystem beyond those constraints? What conditions would we need to cultivate for that future to take root?
Throughout the gathering, The Impossible Garden becomes a metaphor for acts of imagining and cultivating in community. We plant things without knowing exactly how they will grow, or who will eventually encounter them. In this sense, the gathering itself becomes a seed: a small offering planted in the present, carrying ideas, memories, desires, and possibilities towards a future whose shape we cannot yet know
Date & Time
Saturday, 28 November 2026
1 pm–6 pm
Venues
Zeitz MOCAA Track Shed and Members’ Lounge
Entry is free but booking is essential.
For more information, please contact:
Bengi Rwabuhemba at bengi.rwabuhemba@zeitzmocaa.museum
The Zeitz MOCAA & University of the Western Cape (UWC) Museum Fellowship Programme is generously supported
by the Mellon Foundation.
