September 3, 2009 Press Release:

A Wild Partnership: Andries Botha and Ian Player launch Nomkhubulwane

At Premat's factory in Durban's Briardene, the encounter between industry and environment has become manifest as an elephant matriarch named Nomkhubulwane who is introduced to the public today at a reception at 6 pm. Her debut will be heralded by notables of both the art and conservation worlds including her creator Andries Botha and Dr. Ian Player. The Human Elephant Foundation is also launching today the first song to the Wounded Elephant by acclaimed South African musician Syd Kitchen. This song was produced in collaboration with Richard van Wyk, CEO of Earth-Touch.

Background notes on Nomkhubulwane by Andries Botha:

This elephant evolved out of a conversation that I had with world renowned conservationist Dr. Ian Player. I had begun to realize, albeit late in the day, that one of the greatest challenges facing human imagination and creativity is to have a more supportive relationship with the physical world. I was seeking new creative alliances with other professional disciplines to broaden the canvas of the art world within which I operated. I could not imagine a more appropriate person with whom to have such a conversation than Dr. Ian Player who has been holding the earth for as long as I can remember. Our conversation was as explosive as it was breathtaking. I realized that what I was speaking about he had already imagined; the synergy between us around these issues of the imagination, creativity and conservation made the conversation easy to have.

Ian suggested that I should make an elephant to go to the World Wilderness Congress in Mexico this November. He further suggested that I contact Vance Martin, President of the Wild Foundation who are the conference organizers. Vance is, like Ian, a deeply committed environmental advocate known for bridging the interests of people and nature. Vance was clear that he could offer no financial support to make the elephant or get it there but he enthusiastically committed his support for such an elephant to be a symbolic presence at this leading global conference. I understood that, to catalyze this adventure, I would need to make the elephant out of my own resources and then trust other people to contribute their creative and professional inputs to make possible the advent of this elephant in the world. As of today, 3 September 2009, the elephant is now made and ready to launch into the world. Ian Player has taken up the responsibility of accompanying Nomkhubulwane to Mexico. It is now our collective task to rally the necessary financial partners to support her presence there as creativity advocate and conversation catalyst.

Nomkhubulwane is a matriarch, an earth goddess who can morph into many different animal forms. Matriarchs embody organizing principles around memory, social and cultural structure. There is mythic implication to the elephant as a metaphor for the yearning for a forgotten conversation between humans and other living things. The presence of the obedient and committed artisan, persistently weaving the symbolic narrative throughout the work, registers the first devotion to be fully present in this urgent creative conversation. Now new partners must emerge who will place this creative persistence into the world as a language that invites a deep conversation with other material and industrial processes. The essence of the partnership is to catalyze a new creative language that expands environmental awareness and commitment.

A recent conversation with Ian Player and the Wilderness Leadership School made clear that they understand the potential of a partnership that seeks another language to bring pressing environmental issues into the consciousness of a broader public. This elephant embodies the potential for human visual creativity to expand and accelerate the conversation with other creative thinkers about the environment.

The world requires massive collaboration to shift our human consciousness into a more sustainable relationship with the earth. The Human Elephant Foundation (www.humanelephant.org) has been created as an institutional framework to engage other partners in contributing their creativity and industry to this imaginative conversation. It invites inclusive conversations which bridge otherwise limiting boundaries of professional and technical expertise. This elephant has been made from recycled truck tyres, materials which carry obvious references to core challenges around sustainability. Using materials regarded as redundant or burdensome to the planet imbues this particular creative work with all sorts of interesting primary and secondary metaphors. It has been wonderful to build this elephant in partnership with Premat (Pretoria Mat and Rubber). Premat recycles truck size tyres into woven rubber strip mats, providing job opportunities for the unschooled and unskilled. They are a great example of industrial commitment to conservation and human innovation. The elephant was built in their factory and they contributed all the offcut rubber with which the elephant was made. It's a great example of the kind of partnership which is possible.

Our immediate task now is to get Nomkhubulwane to Mexico and the WWC. Once she has graced that conference, it is intended that she tour as a global ambassador of creative possibilities within the physical world. Her station in life is nomadic. True to all other elephants, she will move around the world opening up ancient forgotten paths that link the past to the present. She joins 11 other HEF elephants in the world who are serving as advocates of a shared visionary movement. At some point in the near future, we hope the whole herd may gather. Nomkhubulwane has a particular mandate around issues of the ecology and conservation but she is not restricted to this. She will work to remind us that such an idea can never be achieved in the world without acknowledging the importance of inviting each and every human being into this conversation. She is a witness to remind humans of the intimate relationship between the present and the past, between memory and our future survival.

Elephants are often spoken about as carrying collective memory that increases chances for survival in conditions requiring migration. The elephant utilizes both current experience and memory to survive; they remember both adversity and joy. Human beings have forgotten that we are subject to similar forces. In the ascendancy of our rational faculties to save us from the scourge of superstition, we have sacrificed many aspects of our collective knowledge systems. Matriarch elephants remind us of the implanting of such collective knowledge that increase chances for survival for the herd. We as an intellectual species may not fully appreciate the scope, vision and significance of this collective memory. To develop new modalities of thinking, there has to be a way to move beyond the containment of our rational thought processes, to engage the better part of our rational selves with the forgotten part of our intuitive selves.

The elephant is the largest land based mammal and as such the most portentous symbol of our expanding industrial civilization and the threat it represents to other forms of life. The elephant is strong, enormously powerful yet hugely vulnerable in its relationship to humans. It offers a poignant and timely metaphor to contemplate issues of coexistence and how we must now live. What will we do to change how we live? What will accelerate our commitment to create a more sustainable world? How can an elephant catalyze this conversation and expanded commitment? I am hoping Nomkhubulwane will inspire many more people to ask and address these questions.

Dimensions: Life size African elephant matriarch
Materials: recycled truck tyres and mild galvanized steel armature

For further information or to make a donation: www.humanelephant.org