The Field as Witness positions the sugarcane fields of KwaZulu-Natal as living archives – spaces of becoming, remembrance, and inheritance. These fields are more than landscapes; they bear silent witness to the labour, endurance, and unfulfilled promises of the men and women who worked them. Lives reduced to indenture numbers, ship lists, and fragmentary records left few traces in official archives. What was never photographed, named, or fully documented remains held in the land itself.

Moving through this terrain is the hare, a liminal figure existing between worlds and times. It carries the uncertainty of indenture: people suspended between homeland and plantation, belonging and displacement, memory and erasure. The hare becomes a quiet marker of passage, survival, and adaptation – a surrogate for ancestors who…

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