Abstract
This reflective essay examines Etched in Absence: Inscriptions of Labour, Memory and Erasure, a design-led inquiry into how Durban remembers and forgets through its built fabric. The project interrogates the palimpsestic nature of the city, a place written and rewritten by successive regimes of power, yet haunted by the traces of those displaced. Through processes of reading, tracing, casting, and stitching, the work explores how memory, absence and forgetting might be spatially inscribed without reproducing the violence of erasure. The essay reflects on the project’s evolution, tracing shifts in method, theory and proposition. It considers how architecture can act as a counter-monument, engaging critically with histories of indenture and slavery while proposing new spatial strategies for memorialisation and resilience in postcolonial cities.
Introduction
Etched in Absence emerged from an inquiry into how Durban “remembers” and “forgets” through its architecture. The city, like a palimpsest (Huyssen, 2003), bears the inscriptions of power, displacement and survival, with each era overwriting but never fully erasing the previous. The project engages this condition as both a method and a metaphor, interrogating how architecture might hold silence, absence and the invisible weight of historical trauma. At its core, the work responds to the erased sites of the Railway and Magazine Barracks, once homes to Indian indentured labourers and enslaved Mozambicans, later demolished under the Group Areas Act (Swan, 1985; Bhana and Brain, 1988). The project questions dominant narratives of progress and justice, revealing how forgetting functions as an instrument of power (Ricoeur, 2004; Mbembe, 2001). By intervening in the Durban Magistrate Court, a site that overlays the erasures of the barracks, the project seeks to re-inscribe suppressed histories into the urban consciousness.
Within the unit framing, Etched in Absence speaks directly to the myth of Durban as a city of progress and reconciliation. It reveals instead a city that continues to negotiate its colonial inheritances through its architecture. The project contributes to this discourse by positioning memory as an ongoing, spatial practice, one that resists closure and demands continual engagement.
Original Intentions
The initial proposal set out two central research questions:
• How might architecture reinscribe omitted and traumatic narratives without reproducing their violence?
• How might memorialisation operate differently, privileging lived experience over monumental form (Desai and Vahed, 2010; Henning, 1969)?
Four methods were proposed: tapestry, film, casting, and drawing. Each was conceived as a means of engaging with fragmented histories of indenture and enslavement.