The installation presents historical and contemporaneous topographical survey maps which define the city of Harare through multiple readings and individualized exploration of rail tracks. Portraying the history of the city as an assemblage of maps, laminated over each other, the display reveals the growth pattern of present-day Harare in relation to Southern Africa’s regional development. As in other white settler colonial cities, the imperial imaginaries of company towns and native townships in Zimbabwe grew in tandem with railway infrastructure, in order to facilitate the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and human labour. Today these leftover morphological scars clearly manifest divisive, racist and unjust geographies.
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