This work comprises of a text piece, photographs and a video. I have been working on an ongoing research project which looks at an archive of a forced removal of residents from Rietspriut No. 417 I.R, which was a farm located in Heidelberg, outside Johannesburg, in 1965. What is interesting about this archive is that not only focuses on South Africa’s political landscape at the time but it is also centered on German colonial history more specifically the role played by the Berlin Lutheran Missionaries in removing this community of black people from their land. During my residency at ZKU I had an opportunity to visit the Berlin Mission and the land archives to find out more about the history of this community. What I found interesting in all the documentation is the constant denial of the role the Berlin missionaries played in the forced removal of this community and the contradicting documentation of the events leading up to the forced removal. My work places a spotlight on the discontinuities and ruptures in the documentation found in the German archives and performs an undoing of the predominating narrative presented in the German historical archive.
*The text piece is a representation of my entry into the German archive, I am unable to speak German let alone read it so I decided to get help from the audience during the open haus and they translated some of the material for me. The text piece begins to undo the narrative presented by the Berlin Lutheran Missionaries.
*The photographs are images that I found in the archive, these images will be accompanied by a video piece. When I got back to Johannesburg I had time to sit with some community members about what I had found. The video piece draws from these conversations.