The live performance !k’ańn - Shadow, 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 the performance !k’ańn – shadow, I create a sequence of shadows to visualize words, phrases and fragments of stories told in the southern African San language |xam from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive. The shadows conjure up the people that told and wrote down these stories and the time they lived in. Through trying to speak their language |xam, a language that is now no longer spoken, and filling up the gaps with English, Afrikaans and Dutch, the performance resounds the legacies of colonialism, connecting past and present.