Eyewitnesses (what happened to /gúï-an (Doortje), Ruyter, /úma and the /xam children), is part of a body of work based on narratives told in the Southern African San languages |xam and !xun that form part of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive. A testament to the lives and cultural practices of |xam and !xun people, the archive also provides a unique and rare insight into the impact of the Dutch colonization of South Africa. It is a collection of 13.000 pages of stories and interviews in notebooks, drawings, paintings and photographs of and by |xam and !xun people, collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1870s and 1880s. Folklore and personal accounts were told to them in |xam by several men called |a!kunta, ||kabbo, ≠kasin, Dia!kwain and |han≠kass’o, as well as a woman called !kweiten ta ||ken, and in !xun by four young boys called !nanni, Tamme, |úma and Da.

In a series of artworks I visualise ten narratives from the archive that detail how |xam and !xun people perceived and encountered the Dutch colonists ("the Boers") who threatened their lives, their way of living and their languages. They are eyewitness accounts, as well as narratives where fable and reality, dreams and visions, past and present intertwine, told in the narrators' own words and in their own languages. Engaging different media such as film, watercolour paintings, photo collages, prints, sculptural installation and performance, I bring the ten narratives and the colonial history they harbour into the present, and offers a glimpse of the unique way in which the narrators saw the world.

The four eyewitness accounts that are central to the work Eyewitnesses (what happened to /gúï-an (Doortje), Ruyter, /úma and the /xam children) work are: “|úma: his capture by the Makoba and his Boer masters”, “The |xam and the Dutch”, “Jan Plat's story about his brother Ruyter” and “|gúï-an (Doortje) and her mistress, Trina de Klerck”, shed light on the violent abuse that the |xam suffered at the hands of the Dutch colonists. Sharing details which are often not spoken about, or covered up, the installation fittingly uses print techniques that alternate between visibility and invisibility, creating and disintegrating meaning and form.