Exhibition Opening: Fractured Lifeworlds – Wind: The Architecture of a Death Camp

Join us to meet the people whose work, research, and lived experiences have shaped the project. The opening evening will begin with contributions from the NTLA, the OGF, Forensic Architecture, and others. This will be followed by an evening of conversation and exchange, as well as a musical performance.

A detailed program for the opening event on October 11 will be released shortly. 

Season 2 | Wind: The Architecture of a Death Camp 

A spit of rock extending into the Atlantic was the first anchorage for European settlers in the land that is today Namibia. A few years later, that same rock spit became the first death camp of the 20th century. Whipped by some of the most powerful winds in southern Africa, around 6,000 Nama and Ovaherero people were murdered on Shark Island by the German colonial army. Some were executed, but many more were simply left to die of exposure to the elements.

Today, the German and Namibian governments support a major renewable energy development – the Hyphen Project – which will destroy the unmarked graves of victims of the genocide, and permanently alter the surroundings of Shark Island, a site of mourning for the Nama and Ovaherero.

The echoes could not be more clear, or more painful: the same winds that brought the first settlers to southwest Africa, and which became an instrument of extermination on Shark Island, are set to underwrite Germany’s ‘green transition’ at the expense of Indigenous cultural heritage.

Fractured Lifeworlds’ second season premieres new research on the impact of the Hyphen Project on the region’s environmental and cultural heritage.