'They are disturbing the dead': reconstructing the site of the forgotten first genocide of the 20th century

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jun/05/namibia-shark-island-herero-nama-genocide-fractured-lifeworlds-spore-initiative-berlin-forensic

‘They are disturbing the dead’: reconstructing the site of the forgotten first genocide of the 20th century

At least 3,000 Herero and Nama people died in a German concentration camp at Shark Island, Namibia. A new forensic exhibition in Berlin is using digital technology to unearth how colonisers scarred a landscape, and a community

Hanno Hauenstein
June 5, 2026

isiting the Namibian port town of Lüderitz in late 2024, I came across a small museum run by descendants of German settlers. Alongside imperial German flags and memorabilia, it displayed artefacts of the Herero tribe that had been recovered from nearby Shark Island. What went unmentioned is that, from 1905 to 1907, Shark Island was the site of a concentration camp where Herero and Nama prisoners were subjected to forced labour, starvation and systematic abuse. At least 3,000 people are estimated to have died there.

Shark Island was used as a tourist campsite when I visited. Monuments on the island honoured Adolf Lüderitz and Heinrich Vogelsang, the German merchants who helped establish the colony known as German South West Africa. Today, it is widely reported that Namibia’s white minority – less than 2% of the population – owns roughly 70% of commercial farmland.

Fractured Lifeworlds, a new exhibition opening in Berlin this week, is built around questions of memory, geography and accountability. The show presents four years of research by Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research agency that uses visual reconstructions to investigate human rights abuses from Syria and Palestine to Greece and Germany.

Produced jointly with its Berlin-based sister organisation Forensis and developed in collaboration with Namibian researchers, the exhibition traces the legacy of what has been described as the first genocide of the 20th century. Originally presented at Namibia’s National Art Gallery in Windhoek last year, it now arrives at Spore Initiative in the form of three seasonal chapters, Bush, Wind and Sand, each examining how colonial violence became inscribed into Namibia’s arid landscape.

A painting depicts German soldiers shooting Herero people in 1904.
Germany moves to atone for 'forgotten genocide' in Namibia

The show’s centrepiece is a series of films that combine oral testimony from descendants of genocide victims with meticulous geological research. An eerie 30-minute film on Shark Island reconstructs the concentration camp, showing how German authorities weaponised the island’s harsh environment against prisoners – and shipped their skulls back to Germany for pseudoscientific research. The investigation also identifies sand mounts nearby, believed to be unmarked mass graves for prisoners killed on Shark Island.

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