The Ihaos Project (2024)

Project overview

The ǀhaos Project was an interdisciplinary teaching and learning initiative developed at the beginning of 2024 within the Faculty of Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), Wellington Campus, through collaboration between History Education and Visual Arts Education. The project invited second-year Bachelor of Education student teachers to reimagine family trees through artmaking, family history research, storytelling, and memory work. Rooted in the Kora word for “meeting tree,” ǀhaos became both a creative installation and a dialogical space where identity, heritage, memory, and cultural reclamation could converge through interdisciplinary engagement.

Developed under the guidance of Dr Kobie Meiring and Dr Adrienne van As, the project sought to create more meaningful, embodied, and socially responsive approaches to teacher education by integrating historical inquiry, oral history, heritage engagement, and creative practice. Rather than approaching family trees as static genealogical representations, students were encouraged to critically and reflectively investigate family and community histories through oral interviews, photographs, artefacts, memory objects, storytelling, and historical inquiry. These personal and ancestral narratives then became the foundation for symbolic sculptural trees and installations that explored themes of belonging, ancestry, identity, migration, resilience, memory, loss, and intergenerational connection.

The interdisciplinary collaboration enabled students to engage simultaneously with historical thinking and creative expression rather than experiencing History and Visual Arts as separate academic disciplines. Through inquiry, dialogue, reflection, embodied making, and material exploration, students worked critically and creatively with personal and community narratives while engaging with questions related to heritage, silenced histories, and social identity. The project, therefore, created opportunities for students to participate actively in knowledge production through interconnected historical and artistic processes.

Within the first, History component, students engaged in family and community history research through inquiry-based and oral history approaches. Students conducted interviews with family members, analysed photographs and artefacts, explored memory and storytelling, and investigated aspects of family histories connected to identity, migration, education, culture, work, and lived experience. Through this process, students developed historical thinking skills related to inquiry, source interpretation, empathy, perspective taking, and the relationship between past and present. The narratives and themes emerging from this research informed the symbolic meanings, conceptual development, and material choices within their sculptural works and installations.

Link to assignment brief

Exhibition Events

ZEITZ MOCAA 2024

Selected artworks from the ǀhaos Project were exhibited at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in 2024, positioning student work within one of Africa’s leading contemporary art spaces, as the museum has attracted attention for its innovative combination of history, storytelling, filmmaking, and contemporary artistic practice. On 1 October 2024, the Dean of the Faculty of Education, Professor Mji, officially opened the exhibition. In his opening address, Prof Mji commended the students for their creativity, dedication, and ability to connect historical inquiry with contemporary forms of storytelling and visual expression. The exhibition foregrounded student voice, interdisciplinary learning, and community-centred storytelling, while creating opportunities for broader public engagement with art, heritage, and historical inquiry.

Suidoosterfees 2025

The ǀhaos Project was further extended through a public exhibition at the Suidoosterfees, where student work was presented within a broader cultural and community context. The exhibition encouraged public engagement with themes of identity, heritage, storytelling, memory, and belonging, while also strengthening connections between academic inquiry and community participation.

At the 2025 Suidoosterfees, hosted at the Artscape Theatre Centre, the ǀhaos Project was showcased in the Marble Hall as an interdisciplinary exhibition developed by second-year BEd students from Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Inspired by the Kora word for “meeting tree,” ǀhaos foregrounded themes of identity, heritage, resilience, and cultural memory through artistic practice, personal research, and reflective engagement. The exhibition created a space for dialogue, reflection, and healing by addressing historical erasure and affirming diverse cultural narratives. Its inclusion at Suidoosterfees further strengthened the relationship between creative pedagogy, historical inquiry, and public engagement within a festival space dedicated to heritage and diversity.

In die media: Maroela Media: Suidoosterfees-2005 bring kuns na Kaapstad (26 Februarie 2025)

Journal article

This journal article is currently under review for CPUT’s Paradigm journal.

Title: |haos project: Empowering student voices through an interdisciplinary project at CPUT Wellington Campus

This article explores how an interdisciplinary heritage-based project known as the ǀhaos project empowered student teachers at a South African university to reclaim voice, agency, and cultural identity through a diffractive pedagogy that combined history and art. Grounded in posthumanist, decolonial, and new materialist philosophies, the project invited second-year Bachelor of Education students to investigate family histories and represent these through multimodal artworks. Through this process, students engaged with embodied memory, ancestral artefacts, and oral histories, demonstrating how learning can emerge as a material, affective, and relational experience. Rather than treating history as static content, the project positioned knowledge-making as an ongoing interaction between students, materials, and learning spaces. 

The analysis is organised around three interconnected threads: Embodiment, Indigeneity, and Student Voice. Each of these threads offers insights into how students reshaped their self-understanding and their evolving roles as future educators. Using diffractive analysis, the study traces how students became co-archivists of personal and communal histories, with art-making and reflective writing serving as processes of epistemic recovery and renewal. This research contributes to the fields of decolonial and arts-based education by showing how interdisciplinary approaches can open ethical and emotionally resonant spaces for learning. It argues that heritage and identity are not fixed but are always in the process of becoming and being shaped through sensory engagement, narrative, and critical imagination. The ǀhaos project offers a model for how a relational curriculum can support historical consciousness and ethical growth in teacher education.

Meiring, J. & Van As, A. 2025. |haos project: Empowering student voices through an interdisciplinary project at CPUT Wellington Campus. 

Link to the article submission.