Opening at !Khwa ttu San Culture & Education Centre in Yzerfontein, audiences can now experience an immersive, mixed-medium art installation created by San artists. Titled We Are What Remains, the exhibition combines projected imagery, animation, spatial audio and sculptural elements that engage with the histories, memories, and cosmologies of !Xun and Khwe, two of South Africa’s most storied indigenous communities.

Here’s everything Cape Town needs to know.

More about We Are What Remains

At the heart of the exhibition is a collection of linocut prints made by carving designs into linoleum and
transferring them onto paper, created by !Xun and Khwe artists during the 1990s and 2000s. The artworks
emerged from a little-known chapter in Southern African history.

Following Namibia’s independence in 1990, !Xun and Khwe communities, including former members of the South African Defence Force’s 31 Battalion and their families, were relocated to Schmidtsdrift in South Africa. Originally from northern Namibia and southern Angola, the two distinct communities were brought together through displacement.

In 1993, an arts project initiated by Catharina Scheepers provided a space for !Xun and Khwe men and women living in Schmidtsdrift to create linocut prints. Working in makeshift spaces, the artists produced images reflecting experiences of war, displacement, community and longing for home. Each developed an individual style, with many drawing inspiration from rock art. Today, !Khwa ttu holds 600 original linocuts from the project, preserving an important visual record of the communities’ histories and cultural knowledge.

The exhibition offers an opportunity to revisit this history through the artists’ own perspectives, giving
renewed visibility to their experiences, memories and cultural knowledge.

“The significance of the linocuts lies in their ability to preserve and transmit cultural memory, inherited knowledge, oral tradition, identity, and resilience,” says Magdalena Lukas, Museum Curator at !Khwa ttu.
“They are living archives of San worldviews, sustained through artistic practice rather than written record. For the !Xun and Khwe artists, the linocuts are a vital means of safeguarding endangered cultural knowledge and asserting continuity in the face of profound historical disruption.”

“We learned from our parents, and they learned from their parents, and we want our children to learn from us. Our forefathers created art and we are guided by our ancestors to create this art,” says Luhepu Kaheke, one of the original San linocut artists.

Developed by Open Draft, a South African creative company specialising in cultural curation and immersive design, in collaboration with !Khwa ttu and seven of the original artists, We Are What Remains combines the original linocuts with immersive digital art technologies. Light brings the linocut figures to life, with animations unfolding across surfaces and optical illusions that make the images seem suspended in space.

Together, these elements offer new ways to engage with the artworks and the histories, memories and San cosmologies they reflect.

The team behind the project

We Are What Remains is the third of six exhibitions developed through Futures_Past: Amplifying Memory
with Immersive Technologies, an initiative of the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi
and the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), in partnership with Electric South and funded by the
French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.

The programme brings together creative teams and archives across the three countries to co-create immersive works that offer new ways for audiences to engage with historical collections.

!Khwa ttu is a San culture and education centre on an 850-hectare nature reserve 70 kilometres north of
Cape Town. A non-profit company directed jointly by the San and the Swiss-based Ubuntu Foundation, it
has provided jobs and practical residential training for young San from across southern Africa since 1999.

How to visit the exhibition

We Are What Remains brings an old artistic project back into the limelight, reimagining the work of many indigenous artists and retelling the story of !Xun and Khwe people in an immersive, digital art installation.

Cost: R130 per person (entry to the museum). Learn more via the website.

When: Exhibition on show 31 October 2026 – October 2027 | Monday – Sunday | 9am – 5pm
Where: !Khwa ttu San Culture & Education Centre, R27, Yzerfontein, West Coast

Website: frenchinstitute.org.za
Instagram: @ifas.southafrica
Facebook: ifasculture

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