The audience is immersed in a play of flickering lights and shadows, revolving around an image of film on fire. Until 1951, films were produced on highly flammable nitrate stock. During the South African War, a batch of captured war film reels was strewn across the veld to burn by a Boer general. Light is both illuminating and destructive, revealing and blinding: glowing projector lamps, over-exposed film, cuts into the emulsion become metaphors for the ghosts of history's self-igniting fires. The viewer finds themselves inside the projection apparatus.

Performer: Thabo Rapoo

Assisted by: Gretchen Blegen, Lauren Mulligan, Tumi Rapoo

Bettina Malcomess is a Johannesburg/Berlin-based writer and artist, performing under the name Anne Historical. Her research practice inhabits the entanglement of memory, technology and history. Her published books, include Not No Place (Jacana,2013). In 2018 she formed a collaborative platform for performance called the joining room, she lectures at Wits School of Arts, and is completing a PhD in Film Studies at Kings College London.

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