I found Albow Gardens by luck. I was in a city where everything looked foreign to me, I was there because at home I felt lost, and I needed to prove I was right to be there. So I started walking in search of something to photograph. I went to the suburbs of Cape Town; the city felt too perfect, protected, too clean, no edge. I stumbled upon it. That is how it all started.

I spent three and a half years there.

Albow Gardens was established during Apartheid to house and control a portion of the poor white population, considered non-compliant with the regime's standards and therefore potentially damaging to its image. It later became a residential complex for soldiers from the nearby Ysterplaat military base. Today it is still separated from the surrounding neighbourhood by a fence, its buildings visible from the outside and marked by large black letters of the alphabet.

Rather than becoming a model of racial order, Albow Gardens transformed into something far more ambiguous: a grey zone where the boundaries of apartheid quietly dissolved. Many residents lived beyond the colour line drawn by the regime, through bonds of intimacy, family ties, and informal economies, quietly challenging the system itself.

What first drew me there was its brutalist appearance: the ambiguity of the buildings, the bold black letters on each one. It could have been a residential complex, a reformatory, a prison. I thought it was a prison. I was drawn to its secrecy, its sense of confinement.

What made me stay was a family. Cecil and Bianca, with their eight children, live in building G. Life seemed to concentrate entirely within that apartment, loud, full, warm, but mostly honest. With them, time stopped chasing me; it moved at a pace that was entirely our own. I found comfort I had not known before.

The entire project was shot on film. There are over 3, 200 photographs; the sequence and the edit were done entirely by me, drawing in part on what I learned during the year I spent as a Penumbra Foundation fellow in 2023.