At first glance, it looks like an ad. A bold title. Explosive colors. Graphic elements. Eye-catching. But there’s no product. No promise of improvement. No “buy now.” Instead, you’re confronted with something raw and unsettling: a SAN family I encountered in the town of Khawa, deep in the Kalahari Desert.

The man in the image could barely stand. He sucked the beer from the can as if his life depended on the last drop, without a thought for those around him. His wife, blind, stares into nothing. Empty. Removed from the world. Their daughter, barely visible, tries to gather up what’s left of her father. Scattered around them: burnt clothing, an empty attaché case, sand. There’s not much left.

This image isn’t made to evoke pity. It’s a story of disintegration. A truthful, almost theatrical staging of a culture in free fall. An indigenous people pushed to the edge, unable to keep pace with a world accelerating beyond reach.

The colors are unnatural, green, blue, red, like toxic advertisement light. The QR code and the circular graphics mimic the visual language of modern branding and tech culture. But instead of pointing toward something new, they reveal the gap between our world and theirs. A temporal and cultural rift, where even technology becomes an alien object, but also the last tool we have to tell their story.

“Devil Alcohol” is a warning disguised as an ad.

It doesn’t speak of just one family in one town, it speaks of what happens when the past and the present collide without a bridge between them. When modernity crashes into those who never asked for it, and leaves them in the dust.

This is not an image of a people, but of a precipice, and you’re standing at the edge.

Khawa – Life on the Edge of Survival

Khawa lies in one of the most remote corners of Botswana, south of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, north of the Molopo River, some 200 kilometres from Tsabong, in a landscape ruled by red-orange sand dunes. The settlement began in the early 1970s as a cattle post around a handful of salty boreholes. Efforts to desalinate the water date back to the 1980s, and a few other projects have followed: a school, a church, and little more.

Today Khawa counts about 80 households, most patriarchal, the rest matriarchal, a reminder that survival here demands both hunting and herding. Most families keep cattle, goats, and donkeys. People came for the grazing, though to an outsider the place looks like the very edge of existence.

After asking around, we found the local “mayor.” This time he was official, not just a respected elder, and after a polite exchange, and a small contribution to the community fund, he directed us to a place just beyond the settlement to set up camp. We found a small thicket to shield us from the wind and prepared for a night that would prove bitterly cold. Despite being far south in Africa, Khawa sits at roughly 1,000 metres above sea level. In early autumn the desert radiates away its heat and temperatures fall near freezing. You sleep fully dressed and hope for at least a little rest.

Our presence quickly drew attention. Children came first, curious and bold, and through them we eventually coaxed smiles from the adults. Khawa turned out to be a patchwork community: Bashawa, Batlharo, and others we could not identify by appearance or custom. It was a colorful, ragged mosaic.

Some houses were of brick, but most dwellings were rough stick enclosures, some roofless, others with a bit of thatch. Kitchens were usually in a separate pen. Shade was scarce, shelter from the cold nearly nonexistent. That anyone survives here is astonishing.

Our biologist, once a schoolteacher and later a software director — discovered an unknown species of desert mantis and brought it home to Denmark. It thrived, shedding its skin twice, leaving two perfect husks behind. By the time it reached eight centimetres, he offered it a butterfly. The next day, both butterfly and mantis were dead, a sad, abrupt ending.

Language was another test. We spoke only English and a little Setswana; few locals spoke anything beyond their own tongue. Still, with gestures and persistence, we managed. The families nearest our camp were day labourers from the church construction, living in roofless pens, clearly the poorest in the area. They longed to leave but had neither money nor prospects.

And then there were those beyond help, families drinking themselves to death. Blind from wood alcohol and home-brewed spirits, they staggered about before noon, trousers around their knees, while the wife, a little less blind, tried to make her husband decent. Their daughter, baby on her hip, equally drunk, tried to help. Nearby lay a heap of burned odds and ends, including a scorched attaché case, a testament to a life on the brink.

We tried the impossible: conversation. It began with a single can of beer, which the man took with trembling hands, guided by his wife. He drained it in one go, spilling most of it over himself, while she desperately tried to claim a sip. She failed.

Their fate, I fear, is that of many San across Botswana , no work, no dignity, no hope. We took our photographs, carried the memory with us, and moved on.

The Indigenous Project

For many years, I have journeyed across the world in search of tribes whose lives unfold at the margins of modernity. I have met them, shared moments in their presence, and recorded fragments of their cultures through the lens of my camera. These encounters became short films and photographs, though what I could share publicly was often pared down, restrained by the conventions of media platforms that recoil at the sight of the human body as it exists beyond Western norms.

The Indigenous Project is my attempt to move beyond those limitations. Here, the stories and photographs are not confined to the silence of censorship but are reimagined through visualization, digital transformations of my original images, touched only lightly with the paintbrush. They are not paintings in the traditional sense, but hybrid works: photographs reborn with artistic intention.

Rather than whisper quietly from a museum wall, these works take on the voice of advertising. They carry themselves like billboards on a highway, loud, direct, unafraid. They do not seek subtlety but insistence, calling out to the public about the existence of these tribes. They echo the urgency of survival, the need to be seen, the struggle not to vanish unnoticed into the background of the modern world.

The peoples I have visited live at the farthest edge of the present, caught between the continuity of tradition and the intrusions of global modernity. They adapt, resist, and reinvent, some finding tenuous stability in the currents of cultural tourism, others holding fast to older ways. My hope is that these visualizations, bold and insistent, will amplify their presence, carrying fragments of their realities into spaces where recognition matters.

The project is envisioned as a constellation of five large-scale works, each 150 x 150 cm, accompanied by fifteen smaller works of 71 x 71 cm. Together, they form a chorus, urgent, vivid, and impossible to ignore.

Each piece also contains an interactive element. Embedded within the imagery are QR codes, seamlessly woven into the visual fabric of the work. When scanned by a cell phone, these codes lead the spectator to a dedicated website, offering deeper context: the background of the Indigenous Project as a whole and the particular story behind the artwork in question. In this way, the pieces extend beyond the gallery wall, creating a dialogue that flows into the digital sphere, where more layers of history and meaning unfold.

But there is yet another dimension, more hidden. Under UV light, a clandestine layer of the works reveals itself, marks and impressions invisible under normal conditions, transforming the surface into something entirely new. This duality allows the works to live two lives: one visible, brash, and billboard-bright; the other secretive, spectral, and only accessible to those willing to look beyond the obvious.

In the end, these works are both messages and messengers: fierce signals flaring against forgetfulness, calling attention to worlds at risk of erasure. They do not apologize, they do not conceal, they shout, they insist, they demand to be seen.