About the Project
You grow up in the northern suburbs of Cape Town and you do not notice the palms. They stand in driveways, behind boundary walls, and along quiet tarred roads. They look like they have always been here.
They do not belong here. They were brought across oceans from dry islands and distant coasts because people wanted their ordinary streets to feel like somewhere far away. A man buys a tree, plants it in front of his house, and over forty years that private desire hardens into a landscape. When thousands do it, the foreign becomes normal.
This project is a systematic survey of those choices. It treats the suburban palm not as decoration, but as an archaeological marker of what people wanted their homes to be.
Status: In Progress
This is an ongoing body of work.
The photograph below is the first picture from the survey that does what it needs to do. Good projects take time to build, street by street. More captures, field notes, and research will be added here as the work is made.
