The starting point of Kganye’s archival enquiry were images by the German painter and photographer Marie Pauline Thorbecke, who in 1911–1913 undertook an expedition to Cameroon for a publication by her husband, the geographer Franz Thorbecke on behalf of the German Colonial Society. In December 2022, Kganye set out on a trek across Cameroon, retracing the trail of the so-called Colonial Expedition of 1911 that the Thorbeckes had embarked on 110 years ago.

 While the Thorbecke couple undertook the journey to appropriate objects and photograph people and this vast land for the purposes of imperial extraction, Kganye sets out to symbolically return the objects and images she encountered in the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum’s collections that she had studied during her residency in Cologne. The luggage she carries along the journey, symbolizing the burden of colonial heritage.

Considering the conquest of black geographies as central to the colonial undertaking, she questions both the ownership and restitution of land and objects as an epic undertaking.

The 22 panel, panoramic installation of the film A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023), is derivative of the material form of the ink drawings of Cameroonian landscapes documented by Thorbecke.