Liyana
Simphiwe Buthelezi, South Africa
Description
Title: Liyana
Medium: 7 minute
Dimensions: dimensions variable
Created in collaboration with John Desnoyer-Stewart
My artistic journey, which is an exploration of the aquatic, has brought me to the Pacific.
This was my first time working with animation. Collaborating with John Desnoyers-Stewart, we created Liyana, a seven-minute interactive video installation that explores the digitization of African spirituality and divination. As a digital portal, it invites the audience to interact with a bone reading that responds to their physical movements. It creates an opportunity to connect and convene directly with the water.
Through Liyana, I wanted to imagine what happens when African spiritual technologies and the water spirit world meet digital space—when bone reading becomes an interface, and divination becomes a form of data collection. It is an act of remembrance, conversation, and communion with water as an ancestral being.
This work was installed alongside Ukuzwana as part of my Reveal event at the conclusion of my residency. Both works emerge from an ongoing engagement with water as a sentient being—one that holds memory and resists erasure.
In navigating the city, I was drawn to the historic Pacific Central Station. Impressed by its grand architecture, I was prompted to reflect on the themes of migration, “progress,” and my own arrival on this land. This process involved peeling back the layers of time, specifically around the history of False Creek.
The sites along False Creek carry overlapping histories of belonging, displacement, and erasure: from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples of this land, to the Chinese and Black communities, to the area’s industrial past, which has been all but made invisible through rapid development. These stories echo the story of the water here—its interruption, control, containment, and attempted erasure. People and water are in constant kinship.
The points where rivers and streams flow into the ocean are universally acknowledged in their cultural, environmental, and spiritual significance—the abundance that grows when salt and fresh water meet. With the blocking and containment of these points, water now moves differently through the city. Yet, despite these interruptions, the land and the water remember.
