There Was Something Here Before

There Was Something Here Before was an interactive exhibition by Zahira Asmal that introduced the interlocking layers of past, present, and planned future experience—both hyper-mediated and hidden—that constitute contemporary Cape Town. Concise and metaphorical, its layered design visualised the structural DNA of the city that continues to reproduce spatial apartheid.

The exhibition revealed the city as a palimpsest—made, shaped, and layered with time, politics, economics, and the movement of people. As the gradient shifted from the macro level of the city to more intimate, micro details, the visitor was invited to go beyond the dominant sensory mode of sight into a more polysensory register to encounter the hidden and unseen stories of the wider Cape Town city-region. And as the textures of the exhibition shifted, so too did its scale—moving from cityscape to archive to the intimacy of home.

The exhibition formed part of See, an ongoing project produced by The City, in collaboration with individuals and institutions that are part of, or have a connection to, Cape Town’s past and present. In 2023, Asmal’s research led her to Sri Lanka, where she searched for traces of the Cape ancestors that she had learned about in archives, books, and sites of memory, and that shaped the identity of their descendants. What traces of the Cape ancestors remain? Who and what did they leave behind? What stories are being told about them in the places from which they were taken? These are the questions that fired the making of this exhibition and public programme.

There Was Something Here Before was curated by Zahira Asmal and produced by The City with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka. See more.

It was truly wonderful to be in a conversation which crossed the Indian ocean traversing Cape Town and Colombo and thinking through the conditions of life and possibility in the global south city. We need to face our shared histories of coerced labour, which are so often missing in memory and in scholarly understanding. Such histories become even more powerful when they are both locally rooted and aware of neighbourly parallels. For this reason, it was moving to see an exhibition about Cape Town travel to Colombo and one can only hope for more such acts of solidarity.

Sujit Sivasundaram

Professor of World History, Cambridge University

The exhibition was a thoughtfully curated experience that focused on quiet storytelling with the juxtaposition of ideas, giving the visitor space to reflect and draw their own conclusions. The creative visualisations which involved using the floor as a space, as well as the use of boxes, from which the visitor could also hold, extract, and examine objects, give a tactile and sensory experience not often available at exhibitions of this nature. For me, the idea of such a connection existing between Cape Town and Sri Lanka was completely new and it was an enriching experience to learn of this shared history.

Naazima Kamardeen

Chair of Commercial Law & Head of Department of Commercial Law, University of Colombo

This was an amazing exhibition. In a small intimate space, unlike any museum hall, we encountered a place, Cape Town, its layered histories, and connections through a multisensorial and embodied experience. Touching and feeling archival remains that listed the names of enslaved people who were taken away from Sri Lanka was a completely different way of knowing for a historian such as myself who is accustomed to mining sources for data. Opening boxes created a distinct feeling that lingered on.

There Was Something Here Before

Sujit Sivasundaram

Professor of World History, Cambridge University

Naazima Kamardeen

Chair of Commercial Law & Head of Department of Commercial Law, University of Colombo

Nira Wickramasinghe

Professor of South Asian Studies, Leiden University