Coastal, interrupted
Tanja Bosch
New Media Room: 29.01.26 - 05.03.26
Coastal, interrupted brings film, photography, and walking-based research into conversation to explore how bodies, landscapes, and digital traces intersect along South Africa’s Eastern Cape Wild Coast. The project originates from a five-day hike undertaken not with artistic intention, but through the habitual logics of the quantified self: cellphone and GoPro footage, incidental video, GPS tracking, and the routine recording of terrain, distance, and movement. The installation works deliberately with this non-art origin. It asks what happens when data meant for measurement is revisited as material for sensing the coast’s social, political, and environmental entanglements.
Drawing on the method of media-walking (Iqani and Bosch 2025), the work approaches walking as a way of knowing place, one that reveals both its surface beauty and the layered histories that shape it. The coastline encountered here is not neutral. It is marked by extractive pastoral economies, uneven access, damaged infrastructure, and the long legacies of colonial and post-apartheid geographies. Moving through this terrain means repeatedly meeting boundaries: fences, gates, livestock, private holdings, community pathways, and the residues of labour and displacement. These interruptions become central to how the coast is lived, crossed, and contested.
The film foregrounds the tension between landscape and data. Fragments, glitches, GPX traces, and a brief recorded conversation expose the instability of perspective and the limits of capture. Here, the quantified self does not simply observe the coast-it distorts, fragments, and sometimes overwrites it. At the same time, the landscape pushes back: weather, terrain, and rhythm interrupt the data, disrupting the promise of seamless tracking. The photographs extend this logic. Presented as a dataset, they shift attention from aesthetic coherence toward the conditions under which images are produced. The captions function as coded walk-traces, indexing the political, ecological, and historical tensions that surround each scene.
Across the installation, the researcher’s body appears not as an outside observer but as part of the field, entwined with both land and metric. Coastal, interrupted offers no single perspective. Instead, it invites viewers into the friction between movement and measurement, landscape and data. The installation suggests that walking the coast reveals as much about the limits of digital capture as it does about the coast itself, and that even the most ordinary forms of documentation carry a politics of seeing.
