Shackville AR

Commemorating a decade since the 2016 #Shackville protests, the University of Cape Town revisits this pivotal moment in institutional history through site-specific Augmented and Virtual Reality installations. The project re-sites the symbolic protest shack, originally erected to challenge systemic housing inequalities, linking it with sites like the Rustenburg memorial and the vacated Rhodes Plinth. By overlaying digital artworks onto the physical landscape, the installation recognises technology's potential to extend political discourses and preserve memories that are often physically erased from the built environment. This multidisciplinary intervention invites audiences to ‘re-see’ the campus through a lens of justice, questioning how power reconfigures in the digital age while engaging a new generation in critical reflection on space, memory and digitality. By leveraging Augmented and Virtual Reality, the project acknowledges the risks and potential of opening physical space for deep introspection and critique. It also celebrates interdisciplinarity as a mode of collective tinkering, engagement, and archiving by bringing together colleagues from the Environmental Humanities South (EHS), the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Computer Science, the Institute of Creative Arts (ICA), the Digital Media Lab, and the Department of History.