Hauntology is a collaborative body of work that I developed with hydrofeminist scholars Joanne Peers, Aaniyah Martin, and Abdud-Daiyaan Petersen. It includes over 30 digital collages of archival images and my paintings, created alongside archival research and embodied swimming practices.
In this series, I share just four of these images-each a figuration of submerged stories and spectral inheritances that haunt the shorelines of False Bay and Table Bay in Cape Town. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology (1994), I recognise that history does not simply disappear-it lingers, like a ghost, shaping present realities in subtle but powerful ways. In South Africa, although Apartheid officially ended in 1994, its racial and spatial architectures continue to structure how people live, move, and access land and ocean. The coastline remains deeply haunted by this legacy.
One of the key sites for this project is Windmill Beach, a site now globally recognised through My Octopus Teacher and the Netflix series Penguin Town. While these narratives celebrate the beach as a place of wonder and renewal, the deeper histories are rarely acknowledged: it was once a Blacks-only beach under apartheid, and before that, a concentration camp site during the Anglo-Boer War. These traces remain, affecting who swims there, who belongs, and who feels safe.
The images in Hauntology emerged as figurations-visual and material responses to archival research and conversations across disciplines.
They are collaged, layered and spectral forms that help us piece together fragmented, forgotten, or silenced coastal histories. Hauntology is not just about ghosts-it is about the futures they inhibit and the healing we must imagine in their presence. They hold stories of violence, resilience, biodiversity, and care. They are maps, portals, and offerings.
Memory, heritage, and knowledge-especially in South Africa-are not fixed or neatly contained.
They move like tides: intertidal, fluid, and shaped by moon-pulls, seasonal shifts, and political ruptures.
Like the ocean, these concepts cross boundaries of discipline, language, and epistemology. This project embraces that fluidity, working with the metaphor of the intertidal zone-a shifting space of exchange between land and sea, rich in life and meaning.
We also draw on the idea of ecotones, borrowed from ecology and environmental humanities: transitional zones where different systems meet and interact, producing unique and often unexpected forms of life. For us, these ecotones include the meetings of past and present, science and story, body and water, loss and renewal.
Hauntology is not only about memory-it is about staying with the shimmer: the space where light and shadow meet on the water's surface.
