The Eco-Arts Corridor
A Living Gallery on the Jukskei River
Water For The Future's ambition is to change our experience of the Jukskei River at its root, and nowhere is this more visible than along what we call the Eco-Arts Corridor: a growing sequence of site-specific artworks, sculptures, murals and gathering spaces that treats the river not as a hazard to be hidden, but as shared public heritage worth restoring in full view.
The Eco-Arts Corridor works as an open-air eco-museum, where installations merge with ecological restoration rather than sitting apart from it. It began outside Victoria Yards with the Eco-Tree Seat — a sculptural bench that paired design thinking with a Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) to help cool the area's urban heat island. That first gesture has since grown, through the combined work of WFTF's founding artists and directors, into a series of connected "urban blocks" — Daylight Point, Victoria Yards, and Gear House — where art and ecology merge into acts of remembrance and transformation along the river.
A Corridor Built Block by Block
What has emerged is not the work of a single hand but a genuinely collective one: environmental artist and WFTF co-founder Hannelie Coetzee's early vision, interdisciplinary artist Io Makandal's ongoing body of installations, and WFTF Director Romy Stander's leadership in sustaining and scaling the corridor as an institutional priority have each been essential to getting it this far. The Environmental Art Corridor is, at its heart, a team effort — proof of what collective imagination can build along a river that had been written off as a hazard.
Signature Works Along the River
A handful of realised projects now anchor the corridor. The Listening Garden, created by Io Makandal at Victoria Yards, is a living seed bank and sanctuary where steel sculptures and stone benches cultivate kinship between the river and the community. Nearby, Ophidian's Promise — Johannesburg's first eco-duct — is a serpentine public sculpture built from bricks salvaged from homes demolished during the early-1900s gold mining boom, now planted with indigenous grasses to create a safe wildlife crossing over the river culvert. Eighteen months in the making, it has since featured in the film Burning Rebellion, carrying the corridor's story into the climate movement's cultural imagination.
At Daylight Point — the exact spot where the Jukskei re-emerges into daylight after running underground through the city — a community-designed mosaic invites local children and neighbours to imagine the animals they hope will one day return to a rehabilitated river. It was built as a skills-development opportunity through the Social Employment Fund, leaving participants with transferable crafting experience long after the mosaic itself was finished. Along the culvert at Victoria Yards, Makandal's moss wall text "Be The River" asks passers-by to recognise the river as a living body with its own rhythms and its own claim on our care, while murals such as Flowers for Africa and the Watershed Mural have put paintbrushes directly into the hands of the community's children, turning the walls of a shared library and public spaces into a living record of the ecosystem WFTF is working to restore.
A Global Exchange of Rivers
The corridor's reach now extends well beyond Johannesburg. Cross Currents, an artist residency programme developed with the Austrian Cultural Forum Pretoria, has brought three waves of exchange between the Jukskei and the Danube since its launch in October 2025: architect and planner Marlene Wagner spent a month examining how spatial systems along the river reflect social and political conditions, while artist Anita Fuchs conducted a full botanical survey of the riverbank — cataloguing 116 plant species and 2 species of fungi into a single work, the Jukskei Bouquet — before travelling into the Magaliesberg mountains to find and cast a stromatolite fossil linking the river's present to some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth. In April 2026, WFTF was also invited into the international Soil & Water Finissage at NIROX Sculpture Park and the University of Pretoria, where Makandal's soil artwork If the Earth Had Eyes represented the Upper Jukskei Catchment alongside artists and researchers from across the globe.
That international profile continues to grow: the corridor has formed part of A Feral Commons, a transcontinental Global Co-Commission spanning Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, Victoria Yards in Johannesburg, and Kingston Creative in Jamaica, which positioned the Jukskei as a living example of urban ecological restoration in conversation with post-colonial cities around the world.
The corridor is not only a place to visit — it is also a space for confronting the climate crisis directly. In September 2025, WFTF joined the Well Worn Theatre Company at the Windybrow Arts Centre for the Staging Climate Justice workshop, exploring how performance can move audiences from spectators to participants in the climate struggle. The evening closed with the premiere of Burning Rebellion, a film weaving performance, poetry and community voices around the question of what we are willing to fight for — with Ophidian's Promise featured throughout as part of its visual landscape. Community celebration plays an equally important role: the annual Eco-Bonanza at Daylight Point, held around World Water Day, brings murals, music and storytelling together with practical workshops on turning waste into income, reflecting WFTF's belief that environmental action and community joy are part of the same movement.
Art as Activism
What Comes Next
As the corridor grows, two new works are already in development: Ubuntu – Eroding Prejudice, a sculpture by Ben Tuge carved from invasive timber to address social integration within the community, and the Pollinator Corridor, a series of functional beehive sculptures by Swiss artist Dunja Herzog and Thembalezwe Mntambo. Both continue the corridor's founding idea — that ecological repair and cultural expression are inseparable.
WFTF's ambition for the Eco-Arts Corridor is to build a genuinely sustainable model of eco-cultural tourism for Johannesburg: one where every installation is backed by a dedicated funding stream, transparent reporting, and measurable impact, and where visitors are invited into deep engagement with the "more than human" world of the river rather than a passing glance at public art. As WFTF continues to scale this model, the Environmental Art Corridor remains what it has always been — a pulse of healing and possibility for the community that lives alongside the Jukskei.