The seething wounds inflicted by the South African War are continually suppressed by a pervasive state of historical amnesia. This suppression has reduced memory to a mere psychological recollection, rendering society oblivious to the imperceptible nexus of displacement that connects us all. This condition however appears to not be constrained to the South African War, but recurring in war holistically across time. Where the collaterals find their identities shrouded in the shadows cast by narratives on the front line.

The project is situated on the site of the former, and now largely forgotten, concentration camp in Bloemfontein, which once held approximately 6 000 Boer women and children. It explores how displacement and displaced memory can be re-engaged through a digital memory archive and a series of architectural actants. The focus is on staging an event of active remembrance, using the displacement of body and mind, evoked through atmospheric and sensory progressions, to narrate the embodied experiences of war’s collateral victims in-betweenness, particularly those confined within the South African War’s camps.

Through symbolic and poetic architectural form, the project aims to mediate between the forgotten past and the concealed present. It seeks to move remembrance from a purely cerebral exercise to an embodied experience, one that remains fragile in the face of collective amnesia.