Photography, Spore Initiative © Marvin Systermans & Esra Gültekin
Fractured Lifeworlds: Ovaherero and Nama Claims for Intergenerational Justice
Forensis and Forensic Architecture, Spore Initative in Berlin, Germany
Season 1: Bush: The Environmental Continuum of Genocide | June 6 – October 4, 2026
Season 2: Wind: The Architecture of a Death Camp | October 10, 2026 – January 24, 2027
Season 3: Sand: The Topography of Erasure | February 6, 2027 – April 30, 2027
Design Lead and Co-Curator: Celina Abba
Curatorial Lead: Mark Mushiba
Research Lead: Agata Nguyen Chuong
Coordination Lead: Robert Trafford
Exhibition Production: Simon von Krosigk
Contributors: Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA), Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA), Okandjoze Chiefs Assembly on Genocide, Swakopmund Genocide Museum
Forensis and Forensic Architecture, Spore Initative in Berlin, Germany
Season 1: Bush: The Environmental Continuum of Genocide | June 6 – October 4, 2026
Season 2: Wind: The Architecture of a Death Camp | October 10, 2026 – January 24, 2027
Season 3: Sand: The Topography of Erasure | February 6, 2027 – April 30, 2027
Design Lead and Co-Curator: Celina Abba
Curatorial Lead: Mark Mushiba
Research Lead: Agata Nguyen Chuong
Coordination Lead: Robert Trafford
Exhibition Production: Simon von Krosigk
Contributors: Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA), Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA), Okandjoze Chiefs Assembly on Genocide, Swakopmund Genocide Museum
Between 1884 and 1915, German colonial forces carried out genocides against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in what is today Namibia. Ovaherero and Nama descendant communities, and the land their ancestors inhabited, are still living with that history, through altered environments, stolen territories, and inequalities that have outlasted the colonial period by more than a century.
Fractured Lifeworlds is an investigation into that inheritance.
The exhibition – developed over four years by Forensis and Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with researchers, descendant communities, oral historians, Indigenous scholars, and activists in Namibia and Germany – explores the legacy of Germany’s brutal colonization of southwest Africa (1884-1915), offering an account of ancestral lifeworlds lost to colonial violence.
Namibia’s colonial history is not remote. It is a lens through which to understand the unresolved histories which define the contemporary world – and Germany’s place within them. The continuities traced in this exhibition resonate with issues of environmental crisis, settler-colonialism, reparation, genocide, memory, and the resurgence of authoritarian and fascist politics.
Examining how colonial violence, dispossession, genocide, extractivism and environmental exploitation have been historically and contemporarily entangled, the exhibition seeks to show how both fractures remain open.
Through spatial analysis, satellite imagery, environmental modelling, archival research, and digital reconstruction, Fractured Lifeworlds explores how ‘green energy’ projects are reproducing colonial continuities, exposing the tensions between ‘green transition’ narratives and unresolved colonial injustices.
Fractured Lifeworlds is an investigation into that inheritance.
The exhibition – developed over four years by Forensis and Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with researchers, descendant communities, oral historians, Indigenous scholars, and activists in Namibia and Germany – explores the legacy of Germany’s brutal colonization of southwest Africa (1884-1915), offering an account of ancestral lifeworlds lost to colonial violence.
Namibia’s colonial history is not remote. It is a lens through which to understand the unresolved histories which define the contemporary world – and Germany’s place within them. The continuities traced in this exhibition resonate with issues of environmental crisis, settler-colonialism, reparation, genocide, memory, and the resurgence of authoritarian and fascist politics.
Examining how colonial violence, dispossession, genocide, extractivism and environmental exploitation have been historically and contemporarily entangled, the exhibition seeks to show how both fractures remain open.
Through spatial analysis, satellite imagery, environmental modelling, archival research, and digital reconstruction, Fractured Lifeworlds explores how ‘green energy’ projects are reproducing colonial continuities, exposing the tensions between ‘green transition’ narratives and unresolved colonial injustices.
