Eco-erotic decolonisation and Khoisan revivalism: a research-performance study of the inseparable sensate exchange between land and body as a register for re-indigenisation

Abrahams, Rehane

Eco-erotic decolonisation and Khoisan revivalism: a research-performance study of the inseparable sensate exchange between land and body as a register for re-indigenisation

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis investigates the eco-erotic belonging of Land and body through performance practices as acts of embodied decolonisation and re-indigenisation through the Khoisan hydromythic figuration of Die Waterslang (The Water Snake). Drawing on ritual, trance and other tools of visceral performance-making in site-specific contexts, the study is produced from the bodied material power of Land, objects and practices in a relationality wherein the human is connected to a vaster field co-inhabited by beings that exist in entirely non-human modes. It is a performative ethnography that, in the processes of coming to matter, redefines ethnography (through rubbing against Khoisan anthropology) and performance practice. Methodologically, it is a research-creation study grounded in Indigenous epistemology that utilises an ecology of practices and techniques for intra-active1 making and thinking where there is a continual, inseparable sensate exchange and influence between practice and analysis. Conceptually located in the overlapping fields of Performance Studies, Indigenous feminism, New Materialism, Queer Ecology, Decolonial Studies and Sexuality Studies, it proposes the eco-erotic as a contact zone where the violent legacies of settler colonialism can be disrupted and new narratives and ways of being can emerge. It makes and thinks through three research-creation performance events presented at significant sites in and around Cape Town: Spier Estate in Stellenbosch, the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, and the Amazon development at the Liesbeeck River Confluence. Through these interventions, it proposes eco-erotic decolonisation and embodied knowledge production as a register of Khoisan Revivalism and re-indigenisation.