Climate change is, by its nature, difficult to see. Its timescales exceed human attention. Its effects are distributed unevenly across geography and class. Its causes are systemic and abstract. For communities in the Global South — who contribute least to carbon emissions yet bear the heaviest consequences — this invisibility is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is a political one.
This article examines how artists in Africa and the broader Global South are using creative practice to make climate visible — not as data or policy, but as felt, embodied, culturally specific experience.
The Limits of Scientific Communication
Climate science communicates through graphs, projections, and probability ranges. These tools are essential for policy, but they fail at the most basic level of human engagement: they do not make you feel anything. A graph showing projected sea-level rise in Durban does not convey what it means for the fishing communities along the KwaZulu-Natal coastline who will lose their livelihoods, their homes, and their ancestral connection to the ocean.
“Science tells us the planet is warming. Art tells us what it feels like to lose a coastline, a crop cycle, a way of life.”
What we’re observing is creative practice operating as a complementary form of environmental research — one that works at the level of affect, narrative, and cultural meaning. Science and art are doing different things here, and both matter.
Art as Environmental Witness
Across the African continent, we see artists positioning themselves as environmental witnesses. Their work doesn’t illustrate climate data so much as produce something different — forms of ecological knowledge rooted in place, community, and lived experience.
In South Africa, Lungiswa Gqunta works with water, fire, broken glass, and found materials to make visible the environmental politics that shape daily life in Black communities. Her installation Lawn — a field of glass bottles filled with petrol, their mouths stuffed with fabric wicks — reimagines the domestic lawn as a site of latent violence, referencing both the Molotov cocktails of township resistance and the controlled, manicured landscapes of suburban wealth. Gqunta’s work does not illustrate ecological data. It puts you inside the felt experience of living in environments shaped by extraction, dispossession, and the uneven distribution of environmental risk.
In the Eastern Cape, the Keiskamma Art Project — based in the small town of Hamburg — has spent over two decades producing large-scale communal embroideries and tapestries that record ecological and social change in the region. The project involves more than 150 artists, mostly women, whose textile work maps the impacts of HIV/AIDS, drought, and coastal erosion on their communities. These are not abstract environmental commentaries. They are stitched testimonies — ecological knowledge encoded in thread by the people who live with the consequences of environmental change every day.
Fashion, Material Culture, and Climate
The relationship between fashion and climate is rarely discussed outside of sustainability metrics — carbon footprints, water usage, supply chain emissions. But material culture offers a far richer lens. What people wear, how they make it, and where the materials come from reveals deep relationships between human communities and their environments.
Indigenous textile practices across Southern Africa demonstrate this powerfully. The use of natural dyes derived from local plants means that colour palettes are directly linked to ecological conditions. When plant species disappear due to drought or land-use change, colours disappear too. The cultural and aesthetic loss is inseparable from the ecological loss.
Toward an African Environmental Aesthetics
What would an environmental aesthetics grounded in African knowledge systems look like? We don’t have a complete answer yet. But looking at the work above, some outlines emerge — something rooted in relational ontologies, in community knowledge, in a way of seeing where beauty and responsibility are not separate things.
An aesthetics where the artwork’s value lies in its capacity to make visible what has been rendered invisible — the slow pace of environmental degradation, the loss of biodiversity, the displacement of communities, the erosion of knowledge systems that have sustained human-nature relationships for generations.
This is what we’re watching. Through our research, our conversations, and our collaborations, we are documenting the emergence of an environmental aesthetics that starts from the Global South. We are learning as we go.