Caroline Bittermann

Bernard Giglio

We stand in the South African bush with Professor Lee Berger, the Paleoanthropologist who discovered the richest early hominid site yet found on the continent of Africa and a new species of human relative, Homo naledi, and, lookin...

Through the Tear

We stand in the South African bush with Professor Lee Berger, the Paleoanthropologist who discovered the richest early hominid site yet found on the continent of Africa and a new species of human relative, Homo naledi, and, looking around the site of his discoveries, he says: "Do you know why you feel at home in these surroundings?...because we are all indigenous from here. Everywhere else on this planet we have imposed ourselves; here, the trees, the plants, the animals, have gotten used to the human species and its evolution for millions of years..." It is in this "cradle of humankind" that Artist Caroline Bittermann has been invited by the Nirox Foundation in South Africa to add an artwork to their permanent collection. Caroline has long been working with the concept of the historical English Landscape Garden, where ruins often had critical political impacts in expressing the rebellious opinions of the garden-owners. Here in South Africa, the Artist has created a sculpture in the form of a gate in ruin. The gate in ruin forms a word and is installed at the border between the pristine European looking landscape gardens of the Nirox Foundation and the wild African bush. The word SAN falls apart into three elements: a bench, a pyramid, and two columns. These elements are made out of natural stones, used burned bricks, and dented corrugated sheets, rusty steel, and plants. The word SAN is written on the ground inside the pyramid by the rising sun and gets smaller and smaller as sunlight travels through the day. The SAN population is slowly disappearing from our planet... Thus begins a film dialogue between an artist and renowned scientists in the field of genetic research, anthropology, and cognitive archaeology around the discourse of the beginning of our civilization. The film looks at the SAN people, today "actors" of their own culture in "Living Museums", as carriers of the oldest DNA markers on the tree of our evolution. To affirm or oppose this theory, we sample and compare a SAN woman's and Caroline Bittermann's DNA with Geneticist Professor Himla Soodyall at the Wits University research laboratory. While the DNA comparison reveals its scientific undeniable truth, we also reflect on the SAN's importance in the origin of art, communication and ritual communal behavior. Exploring caves in Cederberg and Drakensberg, we question David Pearce, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec and Pippa Stoknes on the cultural impact of the SAN people's rock paintings and artifacts making Africa the continent where our "Modern Man's" civilization began.To clarify the position of the modern humans in the story of mankind, we construct, with Professor Lee Berger, an animated time line of our evolution, in light of his recent major discoveries. If the SAN people are the foundation of human origin, should the world tolerate that their footsteps are definitely being covered over by the red dust of the Kalahari...? Is their extinction unavoidable? Are human reservations the solution? If we all are descendants of the SAN people, doesn't the light that the artist shines on them cast a shadow on the concept of "race"?

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Through the Tear

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