Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids | 6414.36 nautical miles
Research 1 August 2025–28 February 2026
Process: Details of correspondence over two images of the harbours of Cape Town and Hong Kong. Image © Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids.
Title Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids | 6414.36 nautical miles Dates 1 August 2025–28 February 2026 Location Online Tagline A curatorial correspondence between Hong Kong and Cape Town through A4’s Course of Enquiry. Credits

Lead researchers:
Amandine Vabre Chau
Lemeeze Davids

6414.36 nautical miles begins with a friendship between two curators across distance. First held in the form of calls between Cape Town and Hong Kong, the project unfolds as a Course of Enquiry shaped by both personal and socio-historical coordinates. As Lemeeze Davids (Cape Town) and Amandine Vabre Chau (Hong Kong) work together, they ask how the ecological, cultural and economic ripples of imperialism persist in these two cities. The urban and natural environment carries traces of the past while conditioning the present, and setting the terms for what is yet to come.

In a letter to Lemeeze, on the back of a tear-out calendar page, Amandine writes, “Many people I come across are both surprised and curious about our project, asking, ‘why these two cities?’ I find immense pride in citing our friendship as a foundational stone…” (January 2026). 6414.36 nautical miles also becomes a case study of how a curatorial process might happen across different time zones through digital correspondence.

The research, detailed in the various modules on this page, takes on various forms such as essays, roundtable discussions, physical correspondence, field research, and regular conversations with practitioners. At the conclusion of the Course of Enquiry, a research installation was presented in A4’s Reading Room, which aimed to prototype a model of display for a large amount of research in an accessible form.

A4’s Course of Enquiry is a six-month, open-ended research residency for curators and writers. Seminar sessions take place fortnightly, either in person or online, during which time A4's team and invited practitioners act as critical friends to the resident. Throughout the COE,  the resident is asked to consider and prototype ways of making their research visible to share parts of their process with the public. These eventual translations of the research 'solve for form', finding a manner to express the content that works for the idea or material being expressed.

Process: Lion’s Head from the courtyard of the Castle of Good Hope, May 31, 2025. Image © Lemeeze Davids.
Process: Lion Rock from Wong Tai Sin MTR station, May 26, 2025. Image © Amandine Vabre Chau.
Process: 6414.36 nautical miles research board, November 28, 2025. Image © A4 Arts Foundation.
The Fisherman and the Woodcutter
Lemeeze Davids

A walking research journey through London by two friends. – April 21, 2026

Path page
The Fisherman and the Woodcutter
Lemeeze Davids
A walking research journey through London by two friends. – April 21, 2026
Path page

As part of our Course of Enquiry, which paralleled the port cities of Cape Town and Hong Kong, Amandine Vabre Chau and I took a field trip to London, a place that acts as a ‘halfway point’ between our cities, being a key research location as the epicenter of the British imperial histories that continue to affect Cape Town and Hong Kong today.

We were beginning to understand the significance of the natural world in our curatorial research, and found our inquiry to be reflected by various artists in exhibitions in the city. Their work echoed the implicit power struggles in ecology that we have been interested in.

After a year of digital correspondence, Amandine and I reunited at YDP, a newly opened project space in Bloomsbury that facilitates transcultural dialogue around Asian and Asian diasporic contemporary art.

There were two lion door knockers at the entrance, which, however ubiquitous, we took to be a good omen. It pointed back to our comparison of the iconic mountains in our cities: Lion Rock in Hong Kong and Lion’s Head in Cape Town.

When I showed Amandine this image of our research retrospectively, she noted, “A curious pattern emerges. Doubling, coupling, dichotomies. A strange binary system that hints at an unclean split; how various things mirror each other, as if subconsciously highlighting our own twinning.”

At YDP, a dialogue between two figures was taking place:

Chinese artist Duan Jianyu showcased his painting series, Yúqiáo (2023), which translates to “the fisherman and the woodcutter” (a recurring motif in Chinese literati painting and philosophy). It posits two wise figures, one in the water and one in the forest, serving as observers to changes in our environment. In the metaphor, the fisherman represents a mode that is anti-ambition and non-forcing, following the rhythms of the natural world. On the other hand, the woodcutter is more aligned with discipline and social participation, actively contributing to society.

They find kinship with one another because of their love of nature, but debate over the essence of life.

In one of the earliest surviving handbooks that references these characters, there bears an explanatory note: “Throughout history success and failure can occur in the blink of an eye, but green mountains and clear waters remain unchanged. Millenia of gains and losses, rights and wrongs: this is just what the fisherman and woodcutter talk about, and that is all." 1

This allegory was particularly fitting for the 6414.36 nautical miles roundtable discussion that we were preparing for later in that week, in which we would consider how plants and animals register the histories of cities – particularly those expressions of dominion enacted on or through the natural world.

The Singh Twins (Amrit Singh MBE and Rabindra Kaur Singh MBE), exhibiting large-scale lightboxes for Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire (2025) at Kew Gardens, merged Western illuminated manuscripts with Indian miniature botanical painting. These works detail the British Empire's strategic extractivism, offering narratives like citrus farming in South Africa’s Western Cape to treat European sailors suffering from scurvy en route to South Asia, and another, of the British rule over Hong Kong as a colonial gateway for trade with China (poppies and their milk appearing to the right of the ‘Scramble for China’, referencing the Opium Wars).

European expansion and colonial projects were materially driven by plants: spices, sugar, tea, coffee, cotton, rubber, tobacco. In the roundtable discussion, architect and arts practitioner Sumayya Vally noted that, “Ecology might include seemingly small things to look at, but conversations about species are in fact conversations about colonisation, and, at the other end of the spectrum, indigeneity.”

Similarly, Yto Barrada’s solo exhibition, Thrill, Fill and Spill (2025) at the South London Gallery, used plant-dyed textiles to reference this connection.

The dyes – indigo, madder root, coreopsis, oxalis, and cosmos – were sourced from the artist’s eco-campus, The Mothership in Tangier, Morocco. These species carry colonial histories, such as indigo being historically tied to the use of slave/indentured labour on British Empire plantations in India and the Caribbean.

At the conclusion of our field trip, Amandine and I hosted our roundtable at Delfina Foundation, where we discussed these themes. Serendipitously in their gallery downstairs, Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre presented intimate oil-on-linen studies of Talipot palms painted en plein air in Rio de Janeiro, as a part of his solo exhibition Sanctuary and the Shadow of its Walls (2025).

The portraits of the palms invite the viewer into a conversation about time, reflecting how nature (much like the fisherman and the woodcutter) might act as a passive witness to societal shifts, observing decades, and sometimes centuries, of tumultuous human history.

The Talipot palm lifespan mirrors that of a human, 30–80 years, suggesting a generous thought towards the future: the person who plants the seed may never live to see the tree bloom.

In research through correspondence, Amandine and I might ask ourselves, “Who is the fisherman and who is the woodcutter?” But perhaps it’s not useful to rigidly assign roles when our Course of Enquiry takes an organic conversational form.

This idea resonated deeply after a meeting with Shun-Yu Kwei, a Chinese photographer and filmmaker based in Cape Town. He shared an anecdote: “My friend in Hong Kong met Amandine, just as we are meeting now, and asked her, ‘Why are you doing this project?’ Amandine replied, ‘Friendship.’ That struck me.”
Date:
17 October 2025

Location:
Delfina Foundation, London

Tagline:
A roundtable asking after expressions of power on or through the natural world in Hong Kong and Cape Town.
Roundtable participants:
Lee Kai Chung
Cynthia Fan
Josh Ginsburg
Kerryn Greenberg
Jiaying Kou
Yolanda Li
Tau Tavengwa
Sumayya Valley
Patrick Waterhouse
Process: 6414.36 nautical miles | Roundtable, October 17, 2025. Image © A4 Arts Foundation.

This roundtable discussion marks the mid-point of 6414.36 nautical miles, a Course of Enquiry bringing together a group of practitioners whose work intersects with the histories of Hong Kong and Cape Town as port cities. Hosted at Delfina Foundation in London during the week of Frieze, it uses the gravitational pull of the art fair to think through two coordinates of research: botanical imperialism (palm trees, pine trees, plant migrations) and marine entanglements (abalone smuggling, mollusks, ocean ecologies). Meeting in England invites a direct confrontation with the British imperial histories that continue to affect both Hong Kong and Cape Town.

The invited participants, based in or passing through London, were selected because their practices link to different facets of the enquiry: ecological research, urban planning, or curatorial strategies attuned to extraction, migration, and Afro Asian politics. Their contributions help open up larger conversations around spatial inequality, kinship, and how plants and marine organisms become charged carriers of memory.

Using these coordinates, alongside postcard-sized prints of artworks and harvest cards from A4’s database, the practitioners build a shared field of reference to bolster, challenge and grow the Course of Enquiry. The materials act as entry points into a dialogue about how urban and ecological histories shape contemporary life across cities marked, in different ways, by colonial rule.

"Rey Chow talks about not mending the originary violence of Hong Kong, but rather creating new possibilities out of these external constraints."
– Amandine Vabre Chau

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Port cities are interconnected places. How can that be reflected, for example, in other forms of architecture where people need to get places?"
– Amandine Vabre Chau

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"In Hong Kong, you can traverse two entire districts (connecting through malls, underpasses, and overpasses) without touching ground level."
– Amandine Vabre Chau

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"When institutions started decolonising their collections, botanical gardens were seen as beacons of preservation and conservation. However, if you look at the historical documents of when these plants were collected, there are logs of thousands of plant bulbs that were dug up and then left to rot on their ships."
– Cynthia Fan

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"A patriotic English family might hate the idea of an immigrant moving in next door. At the same time, they may very happily embrace the English rose as a national symbol, which was originally hybridised in China or the Middle East."
– Cynthia Fan

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"The sea – this inscrutable, dark, shifting space that lies between us as researchers – becomes a latent space between our fields that we can reinhabit."
– Jiaying Kou

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Friendship is a space like the sea. Anything might happen. New worlds and ways of being could be born."
– Jiaying Kou

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"If you think about crossing a river, you aren’t necessarily saying, 'I'm going to build a bridge.'"
– Josh Ginsburg

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"A palm tree doesn’t need much care; it can bend as the conditions around it shift."
– Kerryn Greenberg

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"When travelling, I’ve found that similarities in the natural environment, particularly in the plants one finds, can create an odd sense of familiarity, of feeling at home in a strange place."
– Kerryn Greenberg

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"There's a lot of ego involved in curatorial work, the desire to have reached a place of resolution before sharing. It's important that we make space for the kinds of conversations that allow us to present ideas at an early stage when we as curators are in a vulnerable place and can learn from others."
– Kerryn Greenberg

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Wanting to give an impression of a tropical city to the visiting diplomats and investors, some countries would plant palms. The trees became a symbol, an apparatus, to encourage international relations."
– Lee Kai Chung

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Pine trees were planted to cover up the ruins. Because pine trees aren't indigenous to that area, they're failing. The ruins become more apparent through the gesture to erase them."
– Lemeeze Davids

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Our relationship to the land, to the ocean, to the mountain and to the rivers carries a deep sense of grief over everything that has happened, asking, how do I deal with this feeling that feels as old as time?"
– Lemeeze Davids

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"You can't un-touch something – undoing is a form of construction."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"The origin story of Hong Kong is essentially the forced introduction of biological matter: a plant – opium – coming in. Parallel to that, Cape Town's origin story is about it being used as a colonial garden."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"These things have traumatic origins, and there's an inflection point where they become part of a culture because culture isn’t static."
– Patrick Waterhouse

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"The landscape of Hong Kong is vibrant, like a living creature, surfacing or rupturing – resisting the colonial ideas that have been imposed on it."
– Sumayya Vally

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Ecology might include seemingly small things to look at, but conversations about species are in fact conversations about colonisation, and, at the other end of the spectrum, indigeneity."
– Sumayya Vally

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Cape Town had one of the strongest garment industries on the African continent, held together by the Cape Flats communities, and it got wiped out within five years because Chinese imports were coming in, post-apartheid. The destruction of those factories was not just about work, but the destruction of a community backbone."
– Tau Tavengwa

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Nature can be weaponised. In some places, certain varieties of plants are designated for use in public spaces not just to provide shade or greening, but also to facilitate surveillance. For example, some trees are chosen because they branch out above about two metres, ensuring that cameras are unobstructed, and that the plants cannot be used to hide from official view. Landscaping becomes not just about nature, but also about control."
– Tau Tavengwa

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"When it feels like the world is falling apart, it's easy to lean into pessimism. Why does the sublime feeling so often only speak to a future, something yet to come, instead of the present?"
– Yolanda Li

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.

"Nowadays, we see more images of nature than nature itself. We see blue sky, green grass, and think, 'Oh, that looks like the Microsoft screensaver.'"
– Yolanda Li

Invited practitioners join Amandine Vabre Chau and Lemeeze Davids in a roundtable towards their Course of Enquiry, 6414.36 nautical miles.
Process: 6414.36 nautical miles, August 1, 2025–February 28, 2026, 2026. Image © A4 Arts Foundation.
Date:
20 April - 2 May 2026

Location:
Reading Room

Tagline:
A research installation, concluding a Course of Enquiry on Hong Kong and Cape Town as port cities.
Artists:
Jes Fan – with special thanks to the Akeroyd Collection
Jody Brand
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Installation view: 6414.36 nautical miles | Research Installation, April 20–May 2, 2026. Image © A4 Arts Foundation. 

At the close of their COE, and with an array of research across multiple forms in hand, Davids and Vabre Chau wonder how best to render this research through an installation. Following discussions with invited practitioners on ‘how to make research visible’, they explore ways to communicate the critical connections between Hong Kong and Cape Town, wishing to find a form of presentation that can express and evoke emotion (rather than demonstrate a solely intellectual pursuit ) while seeking to avoid either an overwhelming presentation of data or its converse: oversimplification.

What follows is a research installation that prioritises images and interactive elements to detail the project lifecycle. Viewers scan QR codes to hear conversations between Davids and Vabre Chau expanding on nodes like 'Ocean' or 'Friendship'. The installation features browsable harvest cards from roundtables (and related projects), a clipboard of compiled practitioner methodologies, and dated  meeting details from 6414.36 nautical miles.

Artworks by Jody Brand, Jes Fan, and Nolan Oswald Dennis serve as three coordinates. Jody Brand’s sculptural work, 10 Hail Mary’s (2021), featuring abalone shells, links Brand's ancestral knowledge and faith to a resonance between Cantonese cuisine, Cape indigenous foraging, and contemporary trade. Dennis’s model for an endless column (2021) foregrounds an underlying concern of the researchers of turning inherited geographies on their head and insisting on other orientations of the world. Jes Fan's video work uses the oyster (a mollusc with a long history in Hong Kong) as a metaphor for colonial violence, documenting the process of pearl cultivation by embedding words within the oysters' mantles.

Process: A letter posted to Lemeeze Davids, January 2, 2026. Image © Amandine Vabre Chau.
Process: A letter posted to Amandine Vabre Chau, March 12, 2026. Image © Lemeeze Davids.
On botanical gardens

Brockway, L.H. (1979). Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New York: Academic Press.
Baber, Z. (2010). ‘Planting Empires, Producing Science: Botanical Gardens, Plants, and the Roots of Globalization’, Society, History, and the Global Human Condition. Maryland: Lexington Books, pp.586–637.
Ho, V. and Ho, T-W.N. (2025). ‘An Exhausted Colonial Botanist: Charles Ford and Hong Kong Botanical Gardens’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 53(1), pp.133–154.
Ho, V. and Ho, T-W.N. (2024). ‘Imperial Botanical Network and the Formation of the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens’, Hong Kong Studies, 4(1), pp.17–35.
On plants and nature

Dabezies, J.M. (2020). ‘Visuality, palm trees and tourism in Uruguay’, Annals of Tourism Research, 81.
Peckham, R. (2015). ‘Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the greening of colonial Hong Kong’, Modern Asian Studies, 49(4), pp.1177–1209.
Peckham, R. and Pomfret, D. (2013). Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Munnik, G. (2022). For the haunt: Chanelle Adams’ Ghost Tour of Camphor Avenue. Arthrob [online]. Available here.
Orlow, U. and Sheikh, S. (2018). Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
On the Chinese community in South Africa

Crawford Campbell, P. (2012). Chinese Coolie Emigration: The countries within the British Empire. New York: Routledge.
Chee-Beng, T. (2013). Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora. New York: Routledge.
Yap, M. and Leong Man, D. (1996). Colour, Confusion and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Yap, M. (ed.) (1982). The South African Chinese – their way of life. Johannesburg: The Transvaal Chinese Association.
Urban Planning and Spatial Theory

Ho, P.Y. (2018). Making Hong Kong: A History of its Urban Development. Cheltenham and Massachusetts: Edward Elgar.
Perec, G. (1974). Espèces d’Espaces. Galilée: Paris.
Pieterse, E. et al. (eds.) (2019). The Integration Syndicate: Shifting Cape Town’s Socio-Spatial Debate. Cape Town: African Center for Cities.
Didur, J. and Mohabir, N. (eds.) (2025). (Post)Colonial Ports Place and (Non)Place in the ecotone. New York: Routledge.
Oceanology, Tidalectics

Hau’Ofa, E. (2008). We are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Steinberg, P. and Peters, K. (2015). ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(2), pp.247–264.
Trade routes

Chinafrika. under construction (2017). Leipzig: Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.
Enwezor, O. (ed.) (1997). Trade Routes: History and Geography 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. Johannesburg: Thorold’s Africana Books.
Kee, J. (2023). The Geometries of Afro Asia : Art beyond Solidarity. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Lau, W. (2018). An assessment of the South African dried abalone Haliotis midae consumption and trade in Hong Kong. Cambridge: TRAFFIC international.
Ghosh, A. (2023). Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories. New Delhi: Fourth Estate India.
Articles

SMRI, History of Sugar in South Africa. Available here (Accessed 3 February 2026).
Jeewa, K. and Frikech, S. (2022). Decolonising Nature: Sowing Seeds to Unearth the Routes of Water and People. Available here (Accessed 3 February 2026).
South African National Biodiversity Institute, Kirstenbosch NBG: Van Riebeeck’s Hedge. Available here (Accessed 3 February 2026).
World Ports, How much fish and seafood do people eat. Available here.
Header
Close
Text