Uitgeskryf in Grond is a powerful feminist exhibition that reclaims the erased histories of Namakwa womxn and amaXhosa migrant men in the Namakwa copper belt. Through archival artefacts, poetic storytelling, and community-rooted research, the exhibition traces how settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism violently excluded these communities from land, memory, and belonging. It spotlights the gendered labour of Namakwa womxn who held their communities and families together in mining settlements, yet remained invisible in political and historical narratives, and the fractured lives of amaXhosa men recruited under apartheid-era labour regimes. The exhibition honours the enduring resistance and survival of those written out of official histories, and insists that their voices are central to imagining just and decolonial futures.
The work is the result of five years of collaboration between decolonial feminist researcher, Janine Lange and Namakwa poet and activist, Esther Engelbrecht, who began this project in 2020.
