Melissa Kock

Avalon Cemetery. A buffer strip that possesses substantial political agency alongside cultural significance. Its liminality withholds the spatial practices of individuals across the diaspora, revealing to us how individuals construct what some may consider unconventional “counter cartographies of sociality, imagination and liberation”. (Matsipa, 2020)

By delving into the multi-layered relationships between surface-level terrains and underlying subterranean structures using visual art, light is shed on the hidden inscriptions of past legacies duly rooted in the urban fabric as well as its people. Seeking to challenge these structures, “Being towards [Death]scapes” aims to reimagine how individuals navigate physical spaces within the liminal realm of death, resulting in a reignition of one’s sense of self.

By reconstructing the divide with the understanding of place and ritual, between Black African, Coloured, and Indian territories, a structural backbone is formed connecting both realms through a physical and “metaphysical locus towards people’s existential identity”. (Maape, 2012)