'Remember About Mountains: What they are made of is not what made them' is both the title and curatorial method of RESERVOIR’s latest exhibition, bringing together a composite of works by Inga Somdyala, Bulumko Mbete, Dale Lawrence, and the collaborative duo Xhanti Zwelendaba and Ben Stanwix. The line, taken from John McPhee’s 'Annals of the Former World', speaks to consequence rather than content. It proposes that nothing exists in isolation: that every fragment is a particle entering into composition with a whole that exceeds it.1 Here, water, soil, animal fat and pigment meet textile, seed, timber, and grass as relational systems—materials whose encounters speak to unfinished acts of reification, and to the fact that collisions are never singular but move in multiple directions. Landscape is therefore a verb, with water as an exemplar: as a trickster that respects no man-or-ready-made border. It cuts stone, carries mountains, delineates territory, bears cargo, and washes. The title extends this logic of consequence into the human register, where societies and individuals are likewise shaped through their experience of land—through quieter, yet no less insistent, registers: the slow pressure of matter, the persistence of ritual, the sedimentation of memory, the leakiness of ownership, and the eventual erosion of human constructs that unravel regardless of their apparent weight. Inga Somdyala's paintings hold that instability, at scale and with intensity. His subjects range from a cul-de-sac of mountains in Tulbaugh that refused to settle into a single colour or distance, and an attentiveness—to giants and their sense of time—in the smoke over Cape Town's city bowl, Table Mountain's hue, and the folds that flank the N2 seen from Industria. Somdyala frames the abstract work through the idea of ‘atmospheric colour’: fields with no horizon, scaled to the surface itself rather than to any identifiable landmark, producing vastness without an expectant view. This is not Corot’s mountain or Monet’s. Somdyala is less interested in solving landscape as a noun and more so in tracing the paradox of fixity held by light and body, both agitators and allies to the land. He gathers ochre, mineral oxide, black from mountain footpaths, white quarry chalk—pigments that carry cultural significance in isiXhosa adornment and ritual – and suspends them in washes of gouache and oil, rejecting confluence for another type of skin as a right to be unidentified by this syntax. Mbete approaches making on a more intimate scale as if through inheritance. She dyes and redyes textiles in indigo and manjistha, compressing soda ash into folds, stitching resistant paths before colour arrives. The emergent topographies are a negotiation between absorption and resistance, migrations around an enclosure and the fugitivity of unruly leaks. Mbete traces these scores, layering the resultant dye lines, folds, and puckering with beads. Some are glass, while others are hand-forged clay droplets made from local umbria, terracotta, and stoneware, each marked by her fingerprints and adhered to space. The arrangements resemble maps, rivers, pixels, aerial photographs—the geometries of ceremony and of memory, like the dahlias planted outside her grandparents' home, monuments to a personal and generational territory. The work reiterates tactile systems of transmission, instruction, and technology too often dismissed as craft or instinct, as evidence of something larger than the mountain or the settler logic of “properties” that keeps trying to divide the microscopic from the telescopic and people from place. This polemic is intensified and made harsher in Xhanti Zwelendaba and Ben Stanwix's depiction of the Aukoerebis Waterfall in the Northern Cape. Spanning ten panelled ikhukho mats across the gallery’s back wall. Water is implicated as an active feature of cartography, economic history, and as a resource with paperwork. Viewed at its edge, the waterfall is a chasm as a confrontation, force, and blowback, and a strange entropy of a horizon plummeting into self-organised clouds. Over the inkjet image sits a grid of red and green points: contemporary shipping routes and flight paths that commodities must travel in the unsure processes. The natural movement of water comes into contact with the surveyors' mesh so that the two systems glitch against the uneven slats of the mats—traditionally woven from grass or river reeds as a cushion of rest, dreaming, ceremony—as inkspray falls into the cracks, right up to the mat’s edge, and refuses to resolve into one absolute image or a finite mass. And from afar, Dale Lawrence's three wooden speaker panels—coated in animal fat, wax, resin, ash—play back new densities and chatter. For 'Singing Along from Up Above', 'Like Nothing Ever Happened', and 'This Thin Layer' (all 2026), Lawrence mines Reddit threads, John Berger’s ‘Pig Earth’, Liao Yiwu's ‘The Corpse Walker’, the leaks of declassified CIA files that note the ideological borders of the Cold War, and more. He automates narrations thereof, and tunes the scrambled discord and incidental sounds—hums, buzzes, interference typically rejected. Amplified through the tallow, these frequencies become a texture rather than semantic. They loop and form irregularities akin to his process of repeatedly brushing the material mix until it compounds into dense surfaces somewhere between image and substance, resembling something biological and geological all at once: foam, gabbro, and bacteria. The works seem both wet and brittle, ambiguous in undifferentiated sensory fields. A collapse of ancient and new materials into a spectrum of the living, geological, meteorological, and technological, as both a buffer and a sieve, ingested. These four practices are perhaps their own durations: a mountain's splay, a migratory material, commodities afloat, an accumulation of contemporary “muck”. As in the land, the inner shifts, movements, and formations are made by hand, through truces with gods, physics, the mantle, deep mines, bars of Pascal, degrees of Celsius, rhythms, and exfoliation. Glissant writes, “I build my language with rocks”2, noting the primacy of our dependence on land, its alpha and omega status, but also the endless collisions of nature and culture in concert, in particles, and hard use. To remember mountains properly requires a new seismology willing to admit a bias: something relational, exacting, listening, and, against every instinct this country has trained for, soft. ______________________ 1. Georges Bataille, “The Labyrinth,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 174. 2. Édouard Glissant, “Je bâtis à roches mon langage,” in L’Intention poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 43.