During apartheid, many South African neighbourhoods were forcibly cleared and systematically destroyed, causing deep spatial inequalities and social disruption. District Six in Cape Town is the symbol of this: in 1966 it was declared a white zone, and over sixteen years approximately 60.000 residents were forcibly relocated to the Cape Flats. What remains is a landscape of memory: the tangible traces of the old street patterns in the empty land, and an intangible heritage of stories and recollections that former residents and the District Six Museum have preserved over the past decades through research, storytelling, and visual documentation. Fifty years on the land remains largely empty, with only fragments of the old District Six restored. This absence underscores the enduring spatial injustice of post-apartheid South Africa.

The Larry Scully Archive, recently acquired by the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape, consists of a unique collection of colour slides from the early 1970s documenting the destruction of District Six from the perspective of the victims, not of the apartheid government carrying out the destruction. Scully, both an artist and an art historian, captured what the apartheid government sought to erase. Through the UK-SA Digital Humanities Bilateral Chair in Culture and Technics and the New Archival Visions programme, the CHR uses this archive to explore the collective memory of the former community and to examine how aesthetic education can help reimagine a post-apartheid urban landscape, fostering a renewed sense of shared space through the interplay of art, history, and technology.

At the CHR's invitation, I conducted a ten-week artistic research residency on the archive (August-October 2026). I acquainted myself with the slides, made a curated selection, and developed a working method in which each series of works grew out of the previous one: small watercolour sketches, made to get a grip on what Scully wanted to document; from these, a series of small paintings - vignettes of intimate scenes of life during the demolition; then cyanotypes, a contemporary interpretation of the slides showing the neighbourhood and its environment; and finally a series of 'overpaintings': new mixed-media artworks based on Scully's photographs, in which the interpretation of the whole project comes full circle.
Central to this method is slowness: by repeatedly painting, hyperfocussing and cropping the scenes, I began to see and understand more and more. It is through the slow eye of painting that the archive reveals its meaning.

Working intensively with the slides, I came to understand that life in District Six was defined by conviviality, which took place mostly in the defined undefined zones between the private and the public sphere. When the private sphere was destroyed, only a public sphere remained, into which private life was forcibly moved: laundry drying in the street, a woman leaning against the doorpost of a door that no longer exists because the house itself is gone, a man sitting on the stoep of a demolished house. The slides show how people tried to hold on to some sense of normality while their lives were falling apart. This slow, close reading - and the questions it raises about Scully's own intention and awareness as a photographer - forms the interpretive core of my research.

The tension between preservation and destruction sits at the heart of this project, as do the questions it raises about the archive itself: who documents, who is documented, and who is erased?

All in all: an intense period, and it feels as if I've only just begun this journey of discovery with still so much to uncover! The further development of the work and a possible follow-up I will plan in the time ahead. Stay tuned! 

📷 Original slides from the Larry Scully Slide Archive, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, shared with the kind permission of Pam Scully.