Tarmahomed’s project emphasised the significance of earth for dispossessed communities at the Avalon Cemetery. “My project examined the site through an archaeological lens, reading the social relations of displacement, dispossession, erasure and marginalisation embedded in the landscape, and rewriting a set of spatial relations onto it. As a project that emphasises the significance of earth for dispossessed communities in the act of burial, clay brick was used as a primary building material.”

Avalon Cemetery is a buffer zone between the townships of Soweto, Lenasia and Eldorado Park, where the non-European community of Johannesburg, dissected into Black African, Indian and Coloured, was displaced respectively. “Not only is this terrain a common space of death, it is also the generator of political agency and cultural presence.”