Engaged in a collaborative project across many years that uses deep-time, mythology, space and Earth’s nature as its materials, Tommaso Fiscaletti takes time in the Reading Room to unpack the ceaseless gathering and output of Hemelliggaam or The Attempt To Be Here Now. A common love of the Karoo shared by Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler set the project’s creators on road trips towards Sutherland and beyond, armed with Afrikaans science-fiction and their cameras. Read in simultaneous English translation by Grobler (Afrikaans) to Fiscaletti (Italian), the strange and otherworldly content of the books began to infiltrate the photographer's adventures. In this way, Hemelliggaam can be read as a science-fiction of its own. Staged across multiple exhibitions in different contexts over the past several years, its speculative worlds made from people both real and imagined, indigenous mythologies, environmental concerns, and signs and symbols, collide and are reconfigured in endless constellations (whether in a gallery, a book, a studio, a museum) across time and place.

While working at A4 to create associative displays of family photographs, petrified wood and other natural objects collected on his journeys, together with photographs from Hemelliggaam and other projects (such as a journey to Antarctica), Fiscaletti began thinking about another exhibition that could incorporate some of these newer experiments in form. Together with Sara de Beer, they walked Cape Town’s streets on a Sunday, stopping for a coffee at the invitingly named ‘Heaven’ coffee-shop at the Central Methodist Mission alongside Cape Town’s Greenmarket Square. Fiscaletti realised, within the church building dating to 1879, that he had found the location for this work, and with the support and engagement of the church’s community and leaders, his exhibition opened in February to coincide with the Cape Town Art Fair.