District six

Here, the land is not empty—it is absorbing. Holding pain in its layers.

This project traces not only what remains physically, but also what endures emotionally: stories etched into the broken bricks, grief embedded in concrete, grass growing over old streets, weeds pushing through cracks where walls once stood.

Saplings root themselves in silence, drawing sustenance from soil steeped in memory.

This work is a collaboration with those who return—not to reclaim, but to remember. To map out memory against a shifting landscape, and to ask what it means for land to hold loss, and still grow.

  • District Six was once a vibrant, multiracial neighbourhood near the centre of Cape Town, alive with music, food, faith, and everyday community life. In 1966, it was declared a “whites-only” area under apartheid’s Group Areas Act, and over 60,000 people were forcibly removed. Families were scattered to the distant Cape Flats, and homes were bulldozed to rubble.

    Decades later, District Six remains largely unbuilt. Political deadlock, broken restitution processes, and an inability to imagine a just future have left the land in limbo—a no-build zone haunted by silence. Nature has crept in: grasses, flowers, and weeds push through cracked concrete and old street grids. The soil, soaked in memory, feeds new life. It is a landscape shaped by absence, but not emptiness—where the trauma of displacement lingers in the air, and yet the earth still adapts, remembers, and grows.

This collaborative project began when my brother-in-law, Mark, asked me to photograph him in his former neighbourhood—District Six.

What emerged from our walk was a deeply personal entry point into a much broader story—of loss, erasure, and the complexity of return.

  • Mark spent his childhood in District Six before his family was forcibly removed under the Group Areas Act.

    My grandfather was a family GP in District Six and lost his medical surgery when the neighbourhood was demolished—displaced, but inot dispossessed. He moved is practice elsewhere.

  • This project takes shape through ongoing collaboration with families who were forcibly removed from District Six. Together, we return to sites of former homes—walking the area, sharing memories, and making photographs that trace how memory remains embedded in place. Routes to school, corner shops, and places of worship resurface through conversation. Small acts of care are recalled in details: the position of a front step, the slope of a road, a neighbour’s wall.

    This work does not seek to reconstruct what was lost. Instead, it holds space for what persists—layered, complex, and often unresolved. The land, still largely empty due to political deadlock and stalled restitution, has become an accidental archive. Plants grow through concrete. Rubble shifts with the seasons. A bridge still stands, though it leads nowhere. What remains is not static: memory moves through soil, grief sits alongside adaptation, and the ecology of the site continues to reshape what was left behind.

blues for district six

Abdullah Ibrahim

early one new year’s morning

when the emerald bay waved its clear waters against the noisy

dockyward

a restless south easter skipped over slumbering lion’s head

danced up hanover street

tenured a bawdy banjo

strung an ancient cello

bridged a host of guitars

tambourined through a dingy alley

into a scented cobwebbed room

and crackled the sixth sensed district

into a blazing swamp fire of satin sound

early one new year’s morning

when the moaning bay mourned in murky waters against the

deserted dockyard

a bloodthirsty south easter roared over hungry lion’s head

and ghosted its way up Hanover street

empty

forlorn

and cobwebbed with gloom Dollar Brand

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