Protean Routes: Following the Journey of a Flower Across Continents

On 12 June 2025 Protean Routes, a book on the commodification chain of the Protea flower between South Africa and the Netherlands was launched. The book includes photo-essays by South African photographers Jabulani Dhlamini and Jansen van Staden, as well as text essays, published by Dwaalstêr Editions (a collaboration between Hanno van Zyl and Brent Dahl).The event was hosted at Hortus Botanicus, the botanical gardens of Amsterdam.

Protean Routes traces the lifecycle and commodification routes of the protea—South Africa’s national flower and a species rooted in the Western Cape Fynbos biome—from the rugged terrain where it grows wild to the hands that pick, sort, package, and trade it across oceans, ultimately for domestic use.

John Fleetwood had a Q&A session with Dhlamini and Van Staden shared how their fieldwork unfolded across distances and conditions—both geographic and identity and belonging. They reflected on long hours in growing fields, and the evolving relationships with workers and traders that shaped the project. What began as a documentary process soon gave way to deeper meditations on labour, identity, memory, and intimacy.

The project’s essays further anchor these themes through essays written by Evie Evans and Pamila Gupta. Robert Koopman, in dialogue with David Bek, contextualises the wildflower industry itself: its conservation challenges, its fraught relationship with land access, and its dual identity as both heritage and commodity.

Protean Routes offers not only a visual production, but a provocation: to consider what the Protea flower reveals, and what it remembers.

30 July 2025