What if mountains had muscles, rivers were veins and the Earth had a body of its own? In The Uncanny Valley, local artist Thebe Phetogo makes the familiar landscape feel deliciously strange.
GOSEGO MOTSUMI
A river flows through a mountain valley, but something feels off. The colours are electric, the geological layers look almost anatomical, and the landscape seems less like a postcard than a body cracked open. Welcome to Thebe Phetogo’s The Uncanny Valley, where nature gets under your skin, literally.
EARTH, MEET BODY
The Gaborone-based painter is interested in the uneasy territory where the human form and the natural world begin to blur. Mountains become bodily structures, rivers evoke vascular systems, and geological formations take on the appearance of skin, tissue and organs.
“I think of these works as ‘figurative landscapes’,” Phetogo explains.
The title borrows from robotics and computer-generated imagery, where something that looks almost human can trigger an unsettling response. Phetogo takes that psychological glitch and gives it geographical coordinates, transforming the uncanny valley into an actual landscape.
His paintings use bold colour, simplified forms and layered compositions to make the familiar feel unfamiliar. The result is a visual trip in which the Earth appears startlingly alive and the human body no longer feels separate from it.
NOT JUST A PRETTY VIEW
Born in Serowe in 1993, Phetogo approaches landscape as something people belong to, depend on and help shape. His work draws on Botswana’s real and imagined environments, asking viewers to reconsider the ground beneath their feet and the histories embedded in it.
There is a deeper proposition here: the land is not merely a backdrop to human life. It is part of us, and we are part of it. That connection becomes harder to ignore when a mountain starts looking like flesh or a river like a network of veins.
Phetogo holds a Master of Fine Art from the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. His exhibition history includes Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands and Musée Rath in Geneva. He is also a founding member of TBP Artist Collective, which creates exhibition and commercial opportunities for Botswana-based artists.
For those ready to see the landscape differently, The Uncanny Valley can be viewed at Phetogo’s studio in Phase 2, Gaborone.