Fisherchild is a community-based new media project which translates the oral storytelling archive of a small South African fishing community into an interactive digital repository of indigenous marine knowledge. Fisherchild builds on the ancestral and archival work of sixth-generation fisher child Traci Kwaai, who archives and retells the stories of the centuries-old Kalk Bay indigenous fishing community whose livelihoods are threated due to lack of access to marine resources.  As a child growing up under apartheid, Kwaai was denied access to the ocean spaces she lived across from. Today, she works to create access to the ocean for the youth in her community.  

The project was co-created by the artist duo Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze & Amy Louise Wilson) and creative technologist Kyle Marais. Combining new media storytelling technologies like 360 video, photogrammetry, and VR with traditional knowledge and practices, this project creates a repository for holding the stories of the Black and Brown communities of Kalk Bay, as well as a prototype for an archive of indigenous cultural knowledge. It aims to digitally preserve the cultural heritage and identity of this community through the creation of a game-engine built experience which houses the 3D documentation of important artefacts, sites, and oral histories, as well as a site-specific audio walking tour. In a workshop series, youth from Kalk Bay created hand-made media that contributed to the VR experience, working directly with the artists and technologists in a shared creative process. This project is an important contribution to the growing field of African 3D digital cultural heritage. 

Beyond the digital work, the project also addressed local socio-economic challenges. It included the establishment of a community kitchen experiment, where locals produced jarred products linked via QR code to a newly-created app as a means to generate income. This initiative was a prototype for what community-led income generation could look like.