Gathering Bo-Kaap
Masters of Visual Arts Exhibition

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Overview:

Gathering Bo-Kaap is a Master of Visual Arts project that treats food as a living archive — a form of cultural memory that resists erasure because it lives in bodies and kitchens rather than institutions.

Developed in direct response to gentrification and cultural displacement in Cape Town's Bo-Kaap neighbourhood, the project explores how recipes, acts of gathering, and kitchen objects preserve histories that official records fail to hold.

Anthotypes made with borrrie (tumeric)

What knowledge is carried through food when other forms of cultural memory become vulnerable to disappearance?

The work moved through three phases: gathering, making, and troublemaking.

Gathering involved archival research, autoethnographic inquiry, and interviews with Bo-Kaap inhabitants.

Making centred on anthotypes — photographic images produced from food-derived emulsions. Turmeric, beetroot, and red cabbage were used to replicate a CMYK printing process, each ingredient drawn from Cape Malay cuisine. The images are unstable by design: exposed to sunlight, they deteriorate and eventually disappear. A parallel body of embossed works pressed antique colonial silverware motifs into tinfoil takeaway containers, colliding two material registers across time.

Troublemaking brought these threads together through an anarchival logic: resisting the urge to document, represent, or resolve. A projection piece treated footage from a shared meal by stripping its audio and slowing the frame rate to near-stop-motion, keeping the process visible while granting the participants the opacity they deserved.

Outcome:

The final exhibition brought together anthotypes, embossed works, publications, projection, and installation. Rather than presenting food culture as fixed tradition, it framed it as something continually made, shared, and contested.

The resulting body of work operates between archive, artist book, and cultural record — creating multiple points of entry into Bo-Kaap's layered histories without resolving them into something easily consumable.