Christine Dixie lives and works in Makhanda, the Eastern Cape town renamed in 2018 after the Xhosa warrior and prophet Makhanda ka Nxele, who led an 1819 attack on the British garrison at what was then Grahamstown. Two years after that battle, around four thousand British settlers were shipped into the Zuurveld to act, in the words of colonial planners, as "a human barrier" between the Cape and the amaXhosa. Dixie's own ancestors were among them.

"That very problematic history became much more apparent to me," she tells Tamsen Lovell on Taller Together. Her first response was the exhibition Frontiers, dealing directly with the settler ancestry. The line of inquiry has refused to close; Hide, Bathurst Street, Makhanda, and the more recent Bathurst Street installations all set the Georgian archite ...