A grid of eleven granite blocks is laid out across Church Square. These blocks, cube-like in appearance, repose as silent reminders of Cape Town’s slave history. The cubes index the people, local and imported, who laboured until full emancipation in 1838. Solid in their opaque mirrored surfaces, they reflect a changing sky, fragments of the surrounding buildings and some glimpses of passers-by. In this fleeting moment of self-recognition, we see ourselves as living recipients of a history of dehumanised slave labour. Each block is engraved with a text referencing an aspect of slave history: Rebellion and Resistance; Emancipation and Freedom; Slave Contributions to the Development of the Cape; The Influence of Culture on Language; Religion. The prime aesthetic and ethical approach of the artists is that slavery as phenomenon in world history, cannot be represented by figurative means. The artists assert that the power of the abstract cipher, together with an encrypted text, is the most appropriate memorial to our slave past. (WILMA CRUISE AND GAVIN YOUNGE 2008)