“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of the Earth, it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, and where tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, then returned. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea is never at rest. It rises and falls as glaciers melt or grow, the floor of the deep ocean basins shifts under its increasing sediments, or as the earth's crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.” Rachel Carson, the edge of the Sea, 1965.
These installations and photographs based in Cape Town look at the social-ecological relationships between land and sea in the city. A large part of the landmass in central Cape Town called the foreshore is made up of ‘reclaimed’ land. The original shoreline is marked by Strand street (beach street) which runs through the central business area.
The foreshore was constructed in the 1960s during apartheid in order to extend the railway and dig out a larger harbor. Communities who lived alongside the coastline were forcibly removed from the area during the construction process disconnecting people from the ocean and livelihoods they had built over generations and forcing people into a segregated and unjust urban landscape that continues in the present. During the construction of the foreshore alongside peoples' livelihoods, shoreline ecosystems were submerged under rubble.
To mark these changing social-ecological histories I have begun attaching mollusks found on beaches in the city to the walls of buildings along strand street and photographing them. These ghostly shells speak of the entwined social-ecological histories of this space. They also speak to present concerns of rising sea levels and changing climates. Perhaps one day the sea will reclaim this manmade space again changing the shoreline and unfolding new social-ecological relationships.