The Installation 

The installation “Origination” project traces family history, both real and imagined, and attempts to understand the construction of identity and its connection to place. In December 2009, sisters and artists Katy and Rebecca Beinart embarked on a journey by ship, retracing the route of their ancestors from Eastern Europe to South Africa. They then spent two months in Cape Town and environs researching the sites and stories of their ancestors. The works they developed through the residency weave together factual research and mythologised ritual to explore themes of migration, identity and cultural adaptation.

The artist's (mainly Jewish) great-grandparents lived in Russia, Belorussia, Lithuania, Palestine, South Africa, Australia and England; they were almost all migratory, moving their home, sense of place and identity, wayfarers on a continual journey. In thinking about mapping genealogies and the link with Linnaeus's plant classifications,  she became interested in exploring the way plants are transferred by the movement of peoples around the world and how our migrations change, shape and create our environments.

The plant labels refer  to person, journey and plant, making metaphorical connections between the intentional migrations and accidental transferral of plants by humans in their journeys. The labels imagine a plant which each person might have, intentionally or otherwise, taken with them on their journeys.

Plants have many environmental and cultural associations; for example the Bergenia crassifolia (Nicholaus Filaratoff) was also known as Siberian tea when it was first imported to England in the 1600s by botanists in contact with Russian plant enthusiasts. Rye (Secale cereale- see Wolf Beinart) flour was used in Black Bread, a staple of the Eastern European Jewish diet, as were Beetroot (Morris Schreibman), Dill (Zlata Gitovitch) and Caraway (Gitel Apter).

Read more about the performance.