A landscape is where one lives, but often enough, it is also the space of oblivion. Because the landscape is so deeply shaped by the ways in which people inhabit it and work upon it—farming and mining, building houses or whole cities - that which is human-made can assume the form of second nature. This is the terrain that Clive van den Berg attempts to unearth in his installation practice. By marking the surface of the earth, projecting light upon it, or burning and scarring it with ash, he remakes the shaped environment as a space for new paths of communication and for the articulation of narratives which would otherwise remain mute, and perhaps even unspeakable.

In 1988, van den Berg made his first drawing with fire. It was a single word, Gabriel, burnt into the side of sand dunes in Durban. Invoking the angel of wisdom and light, the image was intended to be seen from earth but also from afar, and to suggest the need for intervention at a time of political crisis. Over the years, van den Berg was driven to imagine new methods and forms in which to achieve analogous effects. In 1995, for the first Johannesburg Biennale, he created Mine Dumps, which used lime wash, grass, white-washed stones and braziers. The dumps were planted with grass and cut so that natural light made the hills appear to be embossed. Stones on the dumps evoked the memorials of battle fields. And, at night, the braziers were lit to reveal forms created through punctures in the metal. Seen from afar, like the word Gabriel, these blazing shapes made visible the previously forgotten dumps, so integral to a city and a nation built on mining.

In the site devoted to the recovery of District Six, a notoriously mixed community that was disassembled by Apartheid forces under the Group Areas Act, van den Berg modified this strategy using paraffin and asbestos ropes to create the burning figure of a man running up the mountain. A flaming sequence of stairs showed him the way of ascent. Although District Six is irrevocably destroyed, the nearly performative status of van den Berg's installation helped to reclaim from its place in the shadow of Table Mountain, the space of another history, which Apartheid had tried to efface.

In other instances, however, van den Berg has been involved in overt projects of urban renewal. Because they are comprised of shards and fragments, mosaics provide an ideal medium for this purpose. For this reason, Clive van den Berg has used mosaic - along with other materials like metal, cast aluminum, stone and glass, in a number of projects aimed at the rejuvenation of public spaces. It is important, he insists, that public spaces attract people. The textures and colors of surfaces that are adorned with mosaic images and other textured and three-dimensional forms, solicit people to touch, to see, and to feel the space that they inhabit. Ideally, this engagement with the public domain, as a material and sensuously evocative space, also generates a commitment to the ideal of a public sphere.