Strijdom van der Merwe does not make art for galleries. He works in valleys, forests, lagoons, and the vast open expanses of the Tankwa Karoo, using only what the land offers him, and everything he makes will eventually be reclaimed by the same nature that provided the materials. Sculpting This Earth follows him across four consecutive seasons in the southern African interior as he creates 25 land artworks, each one fleeting and specific to its place. Director Victor van Aswegen shot the film himself over more than a year, capturing the visible change of seasons while building an extraordinary soundscape of ambient nature sounds alongside eleven original compositions by classically trained composer Kristi Boonzaaier. The result is a 95-minute film requiring no prior knowledge of art: one man, landscapes of breathtaking scale, and works so temporary that without this film they would exist only in the memories of whoever happened to be present. The first feature documentary about land art from the southern hemisphere, the film premiered in South Africa in 2022 and received its North American premiere in Montreal in 2024. Official selection and nominated for Best Documentary at the Snowdance Independent Film Festival in Essen, Germany.
Why This Film Matters: Land art was born as an act of resistance, a rejection of the commercial art market, the white cube gallery, and the idea that art belongs to institutions rather than to the world. Strijdom van der Merwe carries that tradition into the southern African landscape and in doing so broadens a genre that has, until this film, been told entirely through the work of artists in North America and Britain. The film also arrives at a moment of acute ecological anxiety. Van der Merwe's works, fragile constructions that acknowledge from the outset that they will not survive, offer something rare: a way of relating to nature that is not about conquest or extraction, but about attention, humility, and impermanence. For a generation that has inherited both a climate crisis and a screen culture that rewards permanence and virality, spending 95 minutes watching beautiful things disappear is a quietly radical act.