Regrounding
2022
Memorial, Commonwealth War Graves, Cape Town
for Craig McClenaghan Architecture
Regrounding
2022
Memorial, Commonwealth War Graves, Cape Town
for Craig McClenaghan Architecture
World War I, thousands of Black South Africans enlist for non-combatant service around the African continent. Their stories untold, unremembered, uncommemorated. Their graves scattered, or nonexistent.
Displaced to the Company’s Gardens in the Table Valley in Cape Town, a historically contested territory, colonial geographies are engaged. The memorial disrupts the geometry of the colonial gardens with a single curved line in the grass, from which a series of tilted planes are articulated.
New ramped pathways are carved to navigate topographic tensions; Indigenous fynbos reclaims the manicured landscape. Arranged shoulder-to-shoulder to form a large ellipse, the names of the fallen are sandblasted into individual black stone slats, and stitched into the landscape. Unsettled ground, settled.