Digital Storytelling Lab

Where the analogue meets the digital in the District Six Museum

The Digital Storytelling Lab  is a project born out of a collaboration between the curatorial team at District Six Museum in Cape Town and affect lab – to explore new ways of telling stories using technology. The Museum is a testament to craftivism, a completely analogue space for the precious oral history, embodied knowledge and the dignity of a community who were forcibly removed from their homes over a period of 20 years between 1959 and 1979 under the apartheid government in South Africa. 

The District Six Museum has been creatively holding the material and oral history archive of their community for the past 30 years. Harnessing the power of resilient narratives and creativity,  their work extends far beyond the boundaries of District Six to very urgent and current questions of displaced people globally.

We worked together with the Museum by first experimenting with sonic archives and creating a location -aware sound walk around the Museum’s immediate neighbourhood filled with sound clips drawn from interviews that the District Six team did with former residents, alongside poetry.

“No matter where we are, we are here”

— District Six community

In a further experiment we played with textures, and specifically where the material meets the digital  through a knitting machine experiment (based on our previous Toolkit for the Inbetween project). We are speculating to see what’s possible for future exhibitions and interventions that use digital tools but without losing any of the unique materiality of the current museum ethos. How AI relates to an existing material archive of photos, artefacts and maps is a central and urgent question in this project.

“I am a stone in this place of stones”

— Tatamkhulu Afrika

Thanks to the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for supporting our work in Cape Town. 📸 by 1000thingsza