Shackville 

Commemorating a decade since the 2016 #Shackville protests, the University of Cape Town revisits this pivotal moment in institutional history through site-specific Augmented and Virtual Reality installations. The project re-sites the symbolic protest shack, originally erected to challenge systemic housing inequalities, linking it with sites like the Rustenburg memorial and the vacated Rhodes Plinth. 

By overlaying digital artworks onto the physical landscape, the installation recognises technology's potential to extend political discourses and preserve memories that are often physically erased from the built environment. This multidisciplinary intervention invites audiences to ‘re-see’ the campus through a lens of justice, questioning how power reconfigures in the digital age while engaging a new generation in critical reflection on space, memory and digitally.

By leveraging Augmented and Virtual Reality, the project acknowledges the risks and potential of opening physical space for deep introspection and critique. It also celebrates interdisciplinary as a mode of collective tinkering, engagement, and archiving by bringing together colleagues from the Environmental Humanities South (EHS), the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Computer Science, the Institute of Creative Arts (ICA), the Digital Media Lab, and the Department of History. 

In February 2016, students at the University of Cape Town strategically erected a shack on the plaza to protest the lack of access to dignified accommodation for Black students in post-Apartheid South Africa. 

This act of protest, which came to be known as Shackville, exposed the starkly different realities of affluent students and those from township communities who are often forced into precarious living conditions. The original structure was purchased from Khayelitsha and assembled early in the morning of 15 February to coincide with the first day of the academic term, successfully bypassing security shifts. While the physical shack was eventually dismantled by police and private security citing ‘institutional functioning’ concerns, the intervention sparked a national debate on spatial apartheid and the unfulfilled promises of transformation in higher education.

The referenced digital artwork MORITI by Mthuthuzeli Zimba, is a travelling shack that serves as a response to ongoing conversations around displacement and homelessness. In this AR experience, a 3D reconstruction of the shack and an accompanying porta-potty are digitally re-staged on the plaza in close proximity to the original location of the 2016 protest shack.

The experience at the UCT Plaza features spatialised audio bubbles containing archival footage, student testimonies, and interviews that provide first-hand accounts of the Shackville movement. Through the interface, students can take photos of the digital shack to share on social media or leave digital messages regarding their feelings and reflections on the experience.

Crucially, the decision to revisit this protest through a digital medium ensures that the intervention does not resurface painful experiences in an unconsidered or physically intrusive way. By leveraging Augmented Reality, the project recognises the potential of digital technologies to extend political discourse beyond the immediate site of action while respecting the sensitivity of the matter. This digital reactivation allows for a "re-seeing" of the 2016 struggle, turning the seemingly unchanged physical world into a canvas for reimagining presence, and the enduring legacies of apartheid in South African universities.

Attribution:

Zimba, M. 2021. MORITI [Installation/Performance]. Cape Town: University of Cape Town, Institute for Creative Arts.

Matusse, A. 2026. Digital Shackville [Unpublished internal document]. Cape Town: University of Cape Town.

The granite plinth originally held a bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes, sculpted by Marion Walgate and unveiled in 1934. In 1962, it was moved to its prominent position on Upper Campus, where the plinth featured an inscription from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘A Song of the Cities’, reinforcing Rhodes’ imperialist aspirations. 

On 9 April 2015, following a month of intense protests led by the #RhodesMustFall movement, initiated by Chumani Maxwele’s protest on 9 March 2015, the UCT Senate voted for its removal. Since then, the plinth has remained an unofficial site for performance and student-led memory work.

Gerald Machona’s video work, Survive (2018) is reimagined here as a four-way Augmented Reality installation that perches on the vacated plinth. The artwork features performer Tankiso Mamabolo wrapped in a traditional Basotho blanket with books stacked atop her head.

The digital intervention replaces the colonial monument with a narrative of Black student experience and resilience. It visualises the duality of education as both a path to progress and a physical or mental burden. By occupying the [vacant] Rhodes Plinth with the image of intellectual insurgence and activist reclamation, the site is transformed from a monument of colonial oppression into a space of decolonial reflection.

Attribution:

Machona, G. 2018. Survive [video]. Single channel HD video STD 2/5. Duration: 4 min 12 sec, looped. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Works of Art Collection. Available: https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/woac/item/30614

“Thina sizwe e si mnyama

Si khalela izwe lethu”

The lyrics of Thina Sizwe, “Thina sizwe e si mnyama, Si khalela izwe lethu” serve as a visceral vocalisation of the Rustenburg Slave Memorial’s history. As a 17th and 18th-century slave burial ground unearthed in 2007 during construction on UCT’s Middle Campus, the space represents the literal and metaphorical taking of both bodies and land. Originally part of the historic Rustenburg farm, the physical memorial was unveiled on 1 December 2013 to coincide with the anniversary of the end of slavery at the Cape. It features excavated wall ruins preserved behind a glass pane.

The AR intervention layers this history with digital clay and salt vessels, which transform the space from a silent archaeological and urban development  site into an active site of mourning. These virtual material cultures take the form of anthills, referencing traditions where mounds stand in for inaccessible graves of long dead ancestors. Functioning as sites of memory and reprieve. 

As visitors navigate the landscape, the anti-apartheid lament Thina Sizwe, emanates from these virtual forms facilitating an immersive vessel for ritualised grief and purification. By integrating the corrosive and preservative qualities of salt with the auditory weight of Thina Sizwe, the intervention seeks to shift the site beyond a place of passive observation into an active space for collective engagement with the histories of the dispossessed.

Attribution:

Prince of Africa Radio. 2022. “Thina Sizwe” - South African anti apartheid song. 18 March. Available: https://youtu.be/fpjlplkdZYI?si=AWOMcmI1fPN5g1Tq

 ––defunct context’ in collaboration with Lebo Masiteng and Thato Makatu, 2026, kheoolo: Mafadi [material culture]‘ clay vessel and salt.

“Witness the Invisiblised” 

A Hyperreal Spatial Installation on the UCT Plaza Container is an immersive Virtual Reality experience housed within a physical shipping container, situated as a hyperreal spatial installation on the UCT Plaza. This multidisciplinary work, a collaboration between Emmy-nominated filmmaker Simon Wood and visual artist/anthropologist Meghna Singh, makes visible the "invisiblised" bodies that enable our modern consumer society. By physically placing the viewer inside the symbolic architecture of global trade, the project confronts the intersection of historical slavery and late capitalism.

The digital experience begins at Clifton Beach, Cape Town, the site where the Portuguese slave ship São José Paquete de Africa sank in 1794, claiming the lives of 212 enslaved people. From these underwater graves, a shipping container emerges—a non-linear, ever-transforming vessel that moves across time and space.

Inside the container, the past and present merge into a series of visceral tableaus. By forcing the viewer into uncomfortable proximity with these scenes, Container challenges the sanitised narrative that slavery is a relic of the past, instead framing it as a continuous cycle of "people as products" within a globalised economy.

Utilising 180-degree stereoscopic video and meticulous spatial design, the project creates a poetic, dreamlike anthropology. Unlike traditional interactive VR, Container is intentionally non-participatory; it casts the viewer as a powerless witness, implicating our own roles as consumers in systems of modern servitude.

Container world premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival and made history as the first VR film invited to screen at the Nobel Prize Giving Week in Sweden. It has since been showcased at major international festivals, including Tribeca, BFI London, and the Luxembourg Film Festival, and has evolved into a series of site-responsive public installations across South African port cities titled In the Wake.

Link to site:  

https://simonwoodfilm.com/container 

Attribution:

Meghna Singh & Simon Wood. Container [Virtual Reality Installation] Duration: 16 Minutes. Saltpeter Productions: Cinematography by Michael Carter, Sound Design by JAndrei Van Wyk  and Music by Shane Cooper

The Founders' Pillars is a provocative multidisciplinary project by director Simon Wood LESIBA MABITSELA &  MEGHNA SINGH. It investigates the physical and ideological foundations of colonial architecture in Cape Town. The work focuses on the four massive granite pillars that stand at the entrance of the Sarah Baartman Hall, University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Upper Campus. 

The project utilises high-resolution 3D scanning and photogrammetry to digitally deconstruct these monumental structures. By stripping away the physical permanence of the stone, the pillar are exposed not just as architectural supports, but as symbols of monumental silence—markers that dominate the landscape while invisibilising the labour and dispossession required to build them.

The work is often presented as a large-scale video installation or a digital archival project. It sits at the intersection of architectural history and contemporary art, using the ‘digital twin’ of the pillars to allow viewers to look through the monument rather than just at it. It is a cinematic meditation on what it means to build a university on contested ground and how the ‘founders’ continue to haunt the space through these skeletal remains.

Link to site:  

https://simonwoodfilm.com/the-founders-pillars 

Attribution:

A SALTPETER PRODUCTION: THE FOUNDERS PILLARS. EDIT & VFX: MICHAEL CARTER SOUND. DESIGN: ANDREI VAN WYK. RESEARCH: AFRICAN FASHION RESEARCH INSTITUTE. AUGMENTED REALITY: NICOLAS ROBBE AND HUNTER WENGLIKOWSKI @ HOVERLAY. DIRECTED by: LESIBA MABITSELA, MEGHNA SINGH & SIMON WOOD