Environmental Afterlives of Colonial Fractures

In 1893, the German Schutztruppen attacked the Witbooi Nama settlement of ||Nâ‡gâs, also known as Hornkranz, in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). This was the beginning of a genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples that reached its peak between 1904 and 1908. This project – a collaboration between Forensic Architecture / Forensis (FA), the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA) and the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) – uncovers traces of genocide hidden within the Namibian landscape and recovers memories of colonial atrocities present within the transformed environment, climate and vegetation, and reverberating through the oral tradition of its peoples. The Nama’s ancestral ways of life were attuned to the environment’s rhythms dictated by the availability of water and long-term recovery of grazed vegetation. These practices, and the lifeworlds that supported them, were obliterated by the colonial genocide and the expropriation of ancestral land, along with its cattle. Through a single bullet recovered from Hornkranz during the team’s fieldwork in 2023, this site-specific proposal draws the inextricable link between colonial genocide and environmental collapse/ecocide. The presentation of the work in the immediate area of the Hartmann factory also refers to the history of the Chemnitz machine factory, which is characterised not only by the production of locomotives and machines, but also by the manufacture of weapons.

The video, which is part of the installation, can be seen particularly well in the evening hours until 11 pm due to the lighting conditions.