Facts and Fabulations
The exhibition Facts and Fabulations is the outcome of a Digital Curatorial Fellowship from the New Archival Visions Programme at the UWC Centre for Humanities Research. The project demonstrates how academic research can become a public, accessible, and participatory cultural experience.
Conceptualized and designed by Prof. Marcos Martins, the project includes extensive research into the Mayibuye Archive’s photographic, historical papers and audio collections. It also involves the participation of UWC graduate and undergraduate students through workshops in which they reinterpreted images and explored related documents from the Mayibuye collections.
The final phase of the project is the exhibition, which explores how digital tools can reshape the experience of archival research. Augmented reality opens hidden layers of historical material, inviting visitors to move between physical images, sound, and digital space. Recorded fabulations created during the workshops are also available for listening. In this way, fabulations and facts become intertwined as indissociable but distinct movements towards truth.
The exhibition offers a slower, more reflective encounter with history, countering the rapid consumption of images and information today. Ultimately, the project explores how truth is shaped, remembered, and experienced, and how space and time might be reopened for deeper engagement with the past.