The design for the new Northern Cape Legislature buildings was the result of an international competition. Initiated soon after 1994 this was one of the first government projects of the new democracy and thus an opportunity to signal the new democratic state. The buildings were designed to fit into and reflect the landscape of the Northern Cape using organic forms, surfaces and materials that referred to local architectural traditions and images that created the possibility for public identification. The artworks were conceived as an integral part of the buildings, married to and indivisible from their form and function. The challenge was to imagine forms that reflected the context and to find images that could show a past that had been erased or suppressed.