The Weight of Things

The Weight of Things is an unfolding body of work situated within the local geography of a single a block of a suburb (my suburb, Strathaven, Harare). It develops through walking, carrying, events of small labour, repeated acts of small-scale intervention and agency, such as repair, moving stones, crushing iron-rich rock, observing runoff channels, tracing desire lines, filling and un-filling a potholes, and attending to the slow transformations of a familiar ground.

These gestures are not solutions but forms of inquiry, ways of reckoning with place through labour, texture, and duration.

The materials of the neighbourhood form the vocabulary of the work: they are traces of both development and decay, inhabitance, economical endeavour and the residue of both the residents, and the migratory members of society. Through these elements, the ongoing work explores forms of knowledge that are embodied, situated, and local; the kind of “illegible” understanding that James C. Scott describes as metis: knowledge produced through repeated contact rather than abstract design. Likewise, the work draws on Nan Shepherd’s insistence that attention is a form of dwelling, and that walking can become a mode of understanding terrain from within.

Social media evidence functions only as a peripheral field site. Posts and stories appear as fragments: material studies, small metrics, sketchbook pages, and day-to-day observations. They offer no explanation, only traces. What appears there is the light outer surface of a slower process—one that unfolds on the ground through weight, repetition, and an ongoing negotiation with the road itself.

Greg Shaw,

7th December, 2025, Harare.

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