Crossings: A Screenplay for the Eerste River

This paper presents Crossings, a multilingual screenplay that interrogates the relationship between archives, memory, and the environment around South Africa's Eerste River. Crossings forms part of Kammakamma, a video project by artist Abri de Swardt exploring narratives entangled with the mouth of the Eerste River. The paper's introduction provides further context for the creative work, including reflections on the research process and discussion of the major environmental shifts interwoven into the storylines within the screenplay. At its core, Crossings is an example of how the historian can experiment with new genres, archival fragments, and fabulation to arrive at alternative narratives of place.