Since naming myself “Cow,” my creative practice has centred on the intertwined relationships between cow, woman, nature, and spirituality. Through this naming, I conceptualise my practice as an embodied exploration of how gender, ecology, and migration intersect in the creation of my art. The parallels between the cow (animal) and Cow (human) form the conceptual foundation of my work, allowing me to interrogate how both are subjected to systems of control, commodification, and displacement under colonial and capitalist conditions. This article is framed as practice-as-research (PaR), positioning my artistic practice and autoethnographic reflections as both methodological and scholarly interventions within African ecological feminist discourse. As an extension of Cow (body), I develop the concept of the Plastic Kraal (space) as a creative metaphor for navigating belonging and alienation, and longing for indigenous ecological wisdom. Plastic Kraal becomes a site for reflecting on loss, transformation, and the erosion of indigenous knowledge within migratory experiences. By integrating personal narrative, material experimentation, and autoethnographic reflections, this article contributes to practice-based research in African feminist art, articulating how personal memory, experiences, and embodied art making function as forms of ecological knowledge production.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a lot of institutions of higher learning started figuring out ways of staying relevant, whilst becoming even more accessible to learners and educators the world over, many practitioners within the fields of art and pedagogy became even more preoccupied with their roles as innovators. To these ends, several innovative strategies of contact and engagement were initiated. Some of the institutions opted to launch a variety of online portals and applications that would rope in wider reaches of their student body, whilst others sought to facilitate carefully monitored in-person sessions at designated sites on their various campuses. Of course, the strictly online-oriented mode was much more readily applicable to such university programmes that depended heavily on theory as opposed to those that required practical approaches and hands-on interpretation of theories. Therefore, one other option that caught on eventually was the hybrid mode. In this, the package on offer included a mix between in-person and online sessions. This hybrid approach to teaching and learning was satisfactorily pragmatic. Working in two separate institutions that had made the decision to take advantage of the hybrid mode, artist-academics and observer-curator duo Nontobeko Ntombela and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, as part of a collaborative artistic/research project that they were developing, decided to propose a course: “Umleqo”*(“Ofie akokɔ”**): Wild Fowl Chasing, what a metaphor for contemporary curatorial and artistic Practice(s)! This course was envisioned to be so malleable in nature, that it had the potential to cut across such disciplines as Art History, Contemporary Art, Interdisciplinary Research, Studio/Post-Studio approaches, Critical Thought and Curatorial engagement among others. It was imagined that the course, in its abbreviated form hence: “Umleqo”, could be taught within Art and Design Schools/Institutions, as well as allied contexts. And by allied contexts, we refer to those situations in which passionate and interested persons, who would hitherto, not have prior training in art contexts, could also benefit from the ensuing discussions that “Umleqo” offered. This submission presents the ways in which our initial thoughts were running as we started playing with notions of fugitivity, immanence, and indeterminacy among others. It is something quite synonymous with Wild Fowl Chasing itself. Having emanated from some sort of trivial banter initially, the idea swiftly evolved into something rather promising …