Inherited

Inherited operates as a transformative adaptation, of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, positing that the novel’s final full stop is not an ending, but the continuation of the story. Conceived through the voice of Joe, an imagined son of Lucy and Petrus, as he navigates the complex reality of being raised in an atmosphere where domestic facts exist without connective tissue and silence gradually accumulates blame.

Presented as a virtual walk-through inside a real-time game environment, the video places the viewer in an imagined recreation of Lucy and Petrus’ farm in Salem, Eastern Cape. The virtual gallery layout for the walkabout was borrowed from the Johannesburg Central Methodist Church’s basement, a site historically charged by anti-apartheid sanctuary and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rather than offering an easy arc toward healing or retrospective confession, the journey documents an architecture of pressure, and hesitation.

Placed throughout this terrain are artworks created by Joe himself, exploring how opposing worlds find practical ways to communicate and work together. In his series Shade and Cover, he uses CycleGAN to reimagine trees that were once cut down and repurposed as underground mining props in Johannesburg through the visual compositions of everyday WeChat messages. Looking to historical precedents like Naspers, which successfully built an enduring partnership with Tencent despite coming from entirely different political and historical origins—the work examines how historical adversaries can collaborate through mutual utility.

Inherited explores what happens in the long wake of silence, looking at how a new generation learns to build and survive on shared ground. The video below documents this virtual terrain, inviting viewers to follow Joe’s traversal, pause where the layout forces hesitation, and encounter the quiet, defensive strategies of survival that exist between the lines.