“The firefighters were heroic, they were smashing away the wall between the two buildings, standing on the roof, doing their utmost to keep our building from the worst of the fire. We had to make fast calls. We had little time to scour the building and make decisions before the fire department entered and began the process of hosing it down.”
Sara de Beer describes the fire that almost burned down Cape Town’s A4 Arts Foundation in December 2020. The space housed irreplaceable work by artists from across southern Africa.
But what do you do when your precious archive of art and books is about to be destroyed?