Shark Island: An Architectural Reconstruction of a Death Camp [electronic resource].

Forensis Forensic Architecture 2024

Open access content

Since 2022, Forensis and Forensic Architecture (FA) have worked with Nama and Ovaherero leadership groups in Namibia to examine sites related to the 1904–1908 genocide perpetrated by the German colonial army against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples. This investigation examines one of the most traumatic chapters in this history: the legacy of Shark Island, the site of the deadliest concentration camp established by the Germans in the colony known at the time as ‘German South West Africa’. Together with descendants of victims and survivors, we reconstructed the camp in unprecedented detail and identified burial sites dating back to the period of the genocide. Descendants’ calls for the preservation of Shark Island and commemoration of the horrors that took place there have taken on new urgency. Significant proposals for commercial and infrastructural development on Shark Island and throughout the wider ancestral lands of the !Aman Nama threaten to destroy further physical traces of this history, continuing a process of erasure already compounded by decades of systemic neglect.
https://www.librarystack.org/shark-island-an-architectural-reconstruction-of-a-death-camp/?ref=unknown

Space (Architecture)
Imperialism
Colonization
Historiography
Violence
Military art and science

Text

Forensis
Forensic Architecture
Eyal Weizman
Ashkan Cheheltan
Agata Nguyen Chuong
Tobechukwu Onwukeme
Christoffer Horlitz
Mark Mushiba
Robert Trafford
Elizabeth Breiner
Isabella Parlamis
Robert Mackey
Omar Ferwati
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Alicia Suriel Melchor
Jasper Humpert
Dimitra Andritsou
Evi Chantzi
Miriam Rainer
Joel Schülin
Fine Bieler
Sina Salimi