The Golden Fog Collector — First Edition (2025)

The Golden Fog Collector is a golden net that captures water from fog and returns it to the pond above which it hangs. Installed in Gauteng, South Africa, near the Cradle of Humankind, in a landscape shaped by centuries of gold extraction and increasing water scarcity, the work transforms an ancient tool of capture into a gesture of restoration.

The project emerged from an investigation into fog harvesting, a technique developed in arid regions where fine mesh structures collect water droplets from the air. Rather than pursuing efficiency as an engineering objective, The Golden Fog Collector brings this existing technology into dialogue with questions of material value, technological history, and ecological repair.

At the center of the work is the net, one of humanity’s earliest technologies. Long before many inventions associated with technological progress, nets extended the capacity to catch, gather, and carry. As structures of knots, tensions, and repeated operations, they also embody forms of knowledge and organization that predate many later technological systems. Yet despite their technological significance, string-based practices have often been understood as craft rather than technology, particularly when associated with women’s, rural, Indigenous, and nomadic cultures.

Constructed from gold thread sourced from traditional European manufactories that recycle gold already circulating through global networks of extraction, trade, and accumulation, the work returns this material to a landscape deeply marked by its mining. Gold, a material historically associated with wealth, power, and technological development, is employed here for its wettability and ability to support the formation of water droplets. Through the encounter between gold and water, the installation reflects on how value is assigned to materials and how those values shift across historical, environmental, and cultural conditions.

The work forms part of The Museum of Lost Technology, an artistic research project that investigates technological possibilities obscured by dominant narratives of innovation. By reimagining the net under contemporary environmental conditions, The Golden Fog Collector asks what counts as technology, whose knowledge is recognized as technological, and how different material traditions might contribute to imagining alternative technological futures.

Supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [10.55776/V795], with additional support from the NIROX Foundation, the Austrian Cultural Forum Pretoria, the Africa UniNet project A Research of Doing, and BMKÖS (Austrian Ministry of Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport). Material research assistance by Miriam Daxl.

Material Studies