Published 17 June 2025 in Interviews
Klyntji - Kuns
Richardt Strydom's protest art against the atrocities in Gaza By Mila de Villiers
Klyntji - Kuns
Published 05 June 2025
(Translated from Afrikaans to English with Google Translate)
Weapons of war. All synthography artwork by Richardt Strydom. Copyright reserved.
He uses AI to express his horror
7 October 2023: a date that leaves a bitter taste in human history; a date synonymous with ruthless human rights violations, unbridled violence and cruelty. The date on which Israeli rulers invaded the Gaza Strip and – almost a year and a half later – continue with their aim to exterminate innocent Palestinians.
“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality,” said Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. And award-winning, local multi-media artist, Richardt Strydom, takes a different approach to the genocide in Palestine, because even though these atrocities are not taking place in South Africa, that does not mean that they are not part of the daily reality of all human individuals.
Richardt turns to synthography – a form of AI that creates digital images, similar to photographs – to express his horror at Benjamin Netanyahu’s apartheid-driven genocide.
I speak with Richardt on a cool Friday evening at his home in Melville. Here’s what he shared with me.
MILA: Richardt, why AI?
RICHARDT: It’s punk. AI, right now, is punk. We don’t know what it does. We don’t know where it can go. Everyone is scared. I think it’s the perfect medium for the time. If Salvador Dalí and the surrealists were alive today, they would have used AI. That’s a bold statement… But no one can prove me wrong, because they’re not alive. It’s an unknown quantity. AI platforms have built-in human moralities, but as an image creation tool, it’s amoral.
MILA: Can you give the layperson’s definition of synthography?
RICHARDT: Every user is going to give their own definition of it; that’s what’s beautiful about it to me. It democratises image-making. So, my definition of synthography is: Someone thought we should legitimise AI imaging. And I think that’s going to change. I think disciplines are going to emerge with their own labels, or tags, or whatever you want to call it. And things are going to merge and things are going to evolve. It’s a new technology.
When photography started, it was a single medium. Photography today has so many multiple expressions. There’s digital, there’s film, there’s retro and there’s genres within photography. I also think it’s a temporary thing. But I think designers, photographers, image-makers and artists are afraid, because they’re precious about their craft. And I think they’re precious about it because their craft isn’t grounded in anything other than skill. And art is never just about skill. Art is about communication, art is about reaching people.
And if you go back to the clichéd Western tradition of art, of the Renaissance art that came out of Christianity, it’s really just about telling people’s stories. And if it’s about telling people’s stories, the medium doesn’t matter. It’s about the story.
MILA: Let’s talk about the subject of your medium. Why the Gaza genocide?
RICHARDT: I’m old enough to have grown up during apartheid. Gaza is a replay of the history I’ve seen happen in our own country. Gaza is a state under apartheid and the violence that happens there today is much worse than… Yes, the apartheid government didn’t drop bombs on townships, but I also don’t think it’s that far-fetched to think that they wouldn’t go there. It’s a small leap in a fucked-up ideology to go from killing people en masse with bullets to killing people en masse with bombs.
MILA: It’s been almost a year and a half since Israel invaded Palestine. What do you say to people who still deny that it was a genocide and that Israel is an apartheid state?
RICHARDT: If you still deny that Israel is an apartheid state, then you only watch Fox News and I don’t know why you, in South Africa, watch Fox News… Even BBC – which is the genocide apologists’ channel at this stage – has already admitted that it is “possibly genocide”. The United Nations, the people who officially identified it as genocide, are not random organizations or one forum. These are international bodies with serious research. It is not AfriForum that goes and says: “Yes, we talked to racists and now we have a problem with farm murders.” This is an actual research-based, consensus-based genocide.
“Dit is ’n actual research-based, consensus-based genocide.”
— Richardt Strydom oor die Israeli-apartheidstaat se volksmoord in Gaza
MILA: Why is AI, as a medium, important for protest art?
RICHARDT: It's immediate. I can now respond to something that happened. Whereas, if I had to go draw it, or paint it, or photograph it, it wouldn't happen. And it's not a great artwork, but it's a great visual piece. The beautiful thing about AI is that it is immediate and it democratises. Yes, I created this thing, but then information came about and it's different. Then I can create something that responds to it, but I can do it quickly. It depends on whether you're reacting in the moment or whether you are making a universal statement.
MILA: You often refer to "responses". What do you respond to?
RICHARDT: I respond to what is going on around me in my world. I respond to what is going on in myself. I respond to what is going on in my context. Sometimes inside my community, but the communities we live in are pretty stable. We’re used to a certain amount of entropy but it becomes stable. Something happens in your community on a regular basis and then we settle into that pattern.
MILA: Do you want to settle?
RICHARDT: No, we should never settle into patterns.
In memory of the +112 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023
The exposed rot of Western morality chokes the air
MILA: I did a deep dive into your Instagram and saw that the first #freepalestine image you shared was a generic Palestinian flag. You shared it on October 14, 2023. Since then, you have approached your own approach to this movement with AI. Tell me about this metamorphosis.
RICHARDT: I post actual images of Palestine now and then. It’s an interesting journey, because I want to create arresting images, but I’m not trying to create images that people think are real. Because it’s obviously not real: I’m not in Palestine, I’m not in Gaza. But at the same time we need to create images that make people take notice. It’s almost like the AIDA model of advertising [Attention, Interest, Desire, Action]. You have to grab attention, and once you have the intention, you can lead people to interest. And I don't think it's unjustified, because if you look at the budget of the Israeli governments, disinformation in publication, in the promotion campaign: You're dealing with global networks or agencies that spend money on PR and disinformation to gloss over the genocide.
"It's an interesting journey, because I want to create arresting images, but I'm not trying to create images that people think are real. Because it's obviously not real: I'm not in Palestine, I'm not in Gaza. But at the same time we need to create images that make people take notice."
— Richard Strydom
MILA: Are you also working on strategies to visually portray your own approach to the genocide?
RICHARDT: Using those same tactics to communicate to people is important. Because you can't compete with someone if you don't use the same tactics. So yes, I go about creating images that I think will be arresting – to pull people in. But at the same time, there's the ethic of not presenting them as factuality. Which is a difficult thing because I have ethics in my process. But the Israeli process of spreading their propaganda has no ethics. But I do share imitations and AI art, I do share things that are not real.
MILA: Without disclosing?
RICHARDT: Without disclosing. I stopped disclosing because I think people are sophisticated enough to realise when things are not real. But the stuff that I do and the level at which I do it, is commentary. Where it becomes a problem is when the technology I have at my disposal is clearly recognizable as AI, whereas the shit that they [Israel] manipulate, you can’t tell …
MILA: You have your own approach to symbolism that has become synonymous with the Palestinian resistance, including a series of artworks depicting watermelons.
RICHARDT: That series is based on vanitas still lifes: a Western construct, but it’s about the transience of man. It’s a personal morality issue, so it reminded me of personal transience. But the political vanitas is a lesson to everyone: We’re witnessing a mass-genocide, we’re witnessing the annihilation of a people. We can go back as far as October 2023, but how many atrocities have been committed before that date. How many genocides, in name and intent, have been committed before that date. I think the Islamophobic fear that we inherited from the West in South Africa blinds us to the fact that there is a serious political imbalance in the world. What we are now realizing with Trump’s trade charade … I have been telling people about the Global South discourse for the last year. And at first no one listened to me. Then I persisted and people started saying: “I see where you’re going, I’m realising.”
MILA: Why do you think people are listening? Why is what you have to say worth listening to?
RICHARDT: I am not alone. I am talking to you. I am one person in one network of people that speak to the system. I do what I feel comfortable in addressing because if someone wants to take me on, I can talk to them about it.
MILA: Why should people look at your art?
RICHARDT: People don’t have to look at it, because it’s on social media; people look at what they want, they ignore what they want. Your outrage is against your intention. It’s not about what you see, it’s what you want to outrage against. And if you don’t take notice of it, you won’t notice it.
MILA: You regularly use statistics and data in your captions, as well as AI images of murdered children metaphorically depicted as dolls. Are you intentionally portraying children as dolls, and not real children?
RICHARDT: I haven’t posted statistics in a long time because statistics, at this point in time, have become so fucking irrelevant. I can, and will post statistics again, but the statistics are no longer shocking; it is now a given and that is the shocking part. The shocking part is not the statistics, the fact that whatever I post, whatever anybody posts in terms of statistics, is irrelevant because we’ve crossed the threshold of humanity … Excuse me, can we get back to the question?
Thirteen thousand twenty-two tiny souls puncture the universe
You can’t put out a fire with a gun no 2
MILA: Do you intentionally portray murdered children as metaphorical dolls?
RICHARDT: You speak for what you can speak for, in this case victim shaming. Feminism was my entry point into victim shaming: Showing people in a situation where they are being martyred, or being oppressed, or being abused just reinforces that cycle. Because it normalises it. So I use dolls as metaphors for children, because you can go on X, you can go on YouTube and literally see Gaza children being burned alive. You can see their bodies laid out on tables; you can see where their limbs are; you can see parents picking up their children’s remains and putting them in plastic bags to have a dignified burial. Art can’t represent the horror of reality and that’s not the point.
MILA: Is there any room for human dignity when it comes to creating art of people who have been stripped of their human dignity, of someone who has become a victim?
RICHARDT: I don’t want to suggest violence porn to people. And they can access that and also, for me to use that as an artist, is just exploiting actual, real tragedy and real violence. And so I used the dolls as metaphors, because it was the most comfortable and probably the most cliché way of doing it, but I thought it was resonant. Does it match the horror of real life? Of course not. It never can. You actually don’t have to look at my art, go look at X and see the real thing. And that is the real fucking horror of Western morality.
MILA: Let’s talk about the metaphor you use in your artwork about a Coca-Cola sign going up in flames.
RICHARDT: This is part of the Power Failure series. There’s the infamous quote, and I can’t remember who said it, but it’s something like: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
We are, unfortunately, trapped in a cycle of profit-making and most people don’t think about it ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Most people don’t consider what is controlling this world. Like Trump tariffs and insider trading – you don’t have to be a genius to recognise that this is an exercise in profit-making. We take for granted how entrenched we are in the system. And we don’t question or consider how entrenched we are.
I think the likes are because it’s an enigmatic image. It’s an image of a burning Coca-Cola sign. I mean it literally as “we need to burn down capitalism”, but it’s an enigmatic image. That’s the beauty of images. That’s the power of images. It plants a seed. Some people get it. Others don’t. But they like it. The image left a lasting impression.
"That's the beauty of images. That's the power of images. It plants a seed."
— Richard Strydom
Ceasefire III
One of three buses
MILA: You also created an image of a burning bus.
RICHARDT: That was completely different. There’s no metaphor attached to it. That’s a literal background and reality. It’s a statistic that’s directly linked to the number of children killed in Gaza every week. It’s the equivalent of school buses, just to quantify it for people. Every day Israel kills a busload of children. It was an attempt to showcase the level of devastation for people, so you have to put an emphasis on visualizing it.
MILA: How do you visualize statistics?
RICHARDT: I think it was a futile, poetic attempt and I think the title is One of three buses. Because if you look at a map or an infographic, it doesn’t quantify the statistic. And that’s not my original analogy, it comes from Democracy for America. I credit it in the headline. It’s literally how many children are killed every day. By presenting it as a school bus, and not a dot on a map, it humanizes the statistics.
MILA: Yet you take an AI approach.
RICHARDT: I could draw it, but it wouldn’t make it real for people. Presenting something that looks a little bit more real makes it real. “How do you make statistics real for people?” You put images to it. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
MILA: You also have a series based on world leaders who are visualized realistically and less AI-esque, including Netanyahu.
RICHARDT: This series is based on the idea of history portraits, where what is important is presented in a dignified way. History is going to portray you differently than you expect. Netanyahu is one of them. There are fewer South Africans because our history, in the context of world algorithms, is not that important. They deserve to be there, but algorithms don’t feature our human rights violations.
MILA: Your Portrait of a butcher series depicts Israeli soldiers in abattoirs. Is this a reference to literal genocide being committed?
RICHARDT: It started with the frame of reference that everyday people are part of the system. The idea was to expand it: Portrait of a gardener, but someone standing in a burning olive grove; Portrait of a gardener, but someone standing in a blown-up ruin. I didn’t get the results I expected. The idea was to portray how everyday people can be perpetrators and that was difficult. Then it turned into Portrait of a butcher, which it rightly is: A soldier is an everyday person who kills people. Each person represents their ideological system that justifies murder, rape and oppression.
MILA: Do you ever get so overwhelmed by something that it prevents you from creating? Or do human rights violations propel your urge to create? Have you ever reached a point where you feel like you can’t keep creating?
RICHARDT: I have to stop watching the news. I’ve tried, but I can’t. I can’t do it, because I have to know what the hell is happening to humanity. And I don’t know how to escape that bubble. But that’s a very good point, the idea that I can’t create anymore, or the idea that I can’t be creative anymore. Creativity is the only way I can express my anger and horror. I reach a point where I lose understanding of what’s happening to humanity. Then I sit down. And that’s the beautiful thing about AI.
I lecture for hours during the day and reach a point where I just have to unload and have a whiskey. Then I just add shit into IIS. I put thoughts into it. The other thing is, people think AI is: You put something in and then the print comes out and it’s perfect. That’s not it. It takes hours. It takes prompts to get a good image. And it's a beautiful process. I put something angry in and shit comes out. But I fine-tune it in such a way that it becomes an image that I believe other people can interpret and relate to and not victim shame. The representation of the person who has already been annihilated should never be exploited.
***
Society as a whole realizes that this is the reality that must be realized. What are you doing, Netanyahu?
Richardt Strydom. Photo provided
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