Using Marabastad as a tester site, the Archive of Silence(s) looks to decentralize and redistribute archival power from the biased National Archives of South Africa to South African communities, allowing them to record their silenced histories.
Following the state’s attempts to rid Pretoria of townships in 2023, the frequent demolitions and the subsequent soil erosion have seen Marabastad develop into a dust wasteland stripped of its heritage by the year 2045.
The remaining residents begin to build the Archive of SIlence(s) using a robotic arm, cotton canvas, steel and artifact-embedded concrete-methylcellulose panels in a process that subverts the discriminatory archival system practiced at the National Archives.
The archive is built to describe chosen community narratives using artifacts of memory and is designed to decay and be rebuilt after every twenty years to grant future generations the opportunity to spatially reconstruct history as a manifesto for their future.