VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The coastlines of Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard are scattered with fragments of slavery, oceanic violence, displacement, and resistance, yet these histories remain largely unacknowledged in the contemporary city. The wreck of the São José Paquete d’Africa (1794), in which more than 200 enslaved people drowned off Clifton’s shores, is one such fragment. As one of the few archaeologically verified slave wrecks in the world, the site remains spatially unmarked, buried beneath an exclusive leisure coastline of pristine beaches and luxury properties. The near-absence of acknowledgement of this tragedy in the landscape exposes a broader crisis in South Africa’s commemorative landscape: the dominance of colonial narratives, the silencing of enslaved histories, and a lack of spatial practices that critically engage with intangible heritage. This paper presents a pedagogical case study—the Landscapes of Memory: Seaside Synecdoche design studio—which positions architecture as a tool for counter-memorialisation and decolonial heritage practice. Through mapping, phenomenology, oceanic histories, and site-based design, students developed counter-memorial architectures for the São José wreck. The site is approached as a spatial synecdoche: a small remnant that stands for the vast and violent architecture of slavery across South Africa. By working with ritual, spirituality, landscape, and embodied experience, the studio explored how addressing a single lost or forgotten part might open pathways to confronting the larger historical whole. Seaside Synecdoche argues that counter-memorial design can commemorate erased histories through spatial experience and foregrounds oceanic and ecological heritage as part of decolonial memory-making. In doing so, the paper contributes to discourse on intangible heritage and proposes ways in which the histories of slavery may be held, narrated, and spatialised in post-apartheid South African cities.