The Santiago Cross/ The Visitors; Visitor

The Visitors

In 1820, the same year in which the Prado Museum opened its doors to display, amongst other treasures, Las Meninas by Velásquez, hundreds of British settlers were deposited on the South African Eastern Cape coast.  This was a strategy employed by the English Empire to create a human barrier against the displaced amaXhosa.  As a descendant of those 1820 settlers, whose presence in the Eastern Cape I perceive as ‘unsettled’, this is a position of a perpetual visitor whose role shifts between that of an interloper, spectator and concealer.