A broken beauty
A tall woman with greying hair, gentle eyes and a comfortable dress, I approached Annelie Venter at the walkabout to her exhibition at the Bellville Arts Association gallery. Annelie’s exhibition “Pause” contains almost 100 small works in oil and acrylic. After years of painting mostly nature scenes, this solo is the first more clearly autobiographical.
Silence, space and time, a reflection on the Cederberg
Stephen Watson was a South African academic, poet and writer who passed away in 2011. His prose and poetry were primarily inspired by the city of Cape Town, but it was in the Cederberg that he found what he calls la querencia, a Spanish word referring “to a place on...
Where Words Cannot Reach
The image of a young Albie Sachs pacing up and down a solitary cell, whistling to some stranger, has stuck with me for years since the first time I’d discovered his story in a BBC podcast. As a daily prison ritual (1963), Sachs and a (then) unknown detainee whistled...
Does AI dream of electric salvation?
In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, the dawn of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a paradigm shift that continues to blur the lines between human and machine communication. As these digital titans rise to prominence, their unparalleled...