Droster Art is an artist-owned studio creating distinctive graphic and fine art prints and wall art. Each open edition is designed in-house and printed using premium matte paper with archival Giclee inks.
A. Dube, a Berlin-based visual artist, works primarily with ink and paper. C. Benedict, based in Lisbon, is a culture producer focused on digital culture and cultural heritage. The two have collaborated since 2014 across Denmark, Germany, South Africa, and Portugal.
What is a Droster?
Three hundred years ago, at the southern tip of Africa, people started running.
They ran from ships. They ran from farms where they were property. They ran from prisons and bosses and people who thought they owned other people.
The colonizers called them Drosters. Runaways. Fugitives. I come from a Lineage of Folk s that defied the structures of empire and lived init but oriented ones self from what the landscape wood say , never jus the maps.
Here’s something the textbooks don’t tell you:
You already know fractals.
You know that your grandmother’s recipe feeds six people, and to feed twelve you double everything. That’s scaling.
You know that a fern leaf has the same shape as the whole fern. That’s self-similarity.
You know that a protest chant echoes and grows as more voices join. That’s iteration.
These aren’t metaphors. These are mathematical structures. You carry them in your body, in your language, in the way you arrange your living room.I’m a Black queer artist. I grew up between worlds.I learned from our elders that our patterns carry meaning—each line, each curve, each repetition Armed with this knowledge i have been crafting lino and these fractals these prints are a result of this embodied knowledge that lingers in us.
In my reclamation of this aesthetic ,
I become a conduit for this imagary
I call it Droster.
I call it survival geometry.
I call it my inheritance.
These prints are that inheritance,
We reproduced them for anyone who needs it.
When you purchase a DROSTER print, you are not buying decoration.
You are acquiring a pattern.They’re tools. They’re inheritance. They’re instructions from ancestors who escaped and built anyway.
First glance: beauty.
Second glance: chaordic symmetries.
Third glance: happy I bought a print
Glossary of Terms
Black Consciousness
(after Steve Biko)
The recognition that Blackness is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived. Not a reaction to whiteness but an inward turning—toward oneself, one’s people, one’s own sense of what matters. Biko said: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Black consciousness is the act of taking that mind back. It is not anti-white. It is pro-Black in the same way that a tree is pro-soil. It simply knows where it comes from and where it stands.
Community
Not the people who share your zip code. Not the people who share your skin tone by census definition.
Community is the group you can call at 3am. The people who will hold your secrets and your children. The ones who show up when showing up costs something. In Droster terms, community is the cooking fire—each light visible from the mountain, each one signaling safety to the others.
Community is what the colonizer tried to break. It’s what we kept building anyway.
Data
The raw material. The unprocessed. The what.
How many runaways lit fires on Table Mountain. Which year the Griqua declared themselves a nation. The names colonial archives bothered to write down and the names they burned.
Data is the stone before it becomes a wall. Useful. Necessary. Not yet shelter.
Defiance
Not the same as resistance.
Resistance pushes back. Defiance acts as if the thing opposing you does not exist. Resistance says “you will not stop me.” Defiance says “I wasn’t asking.”
The cooking fires on the mountain were defiance. Not a protest. Not a petition. Just light, where light was not supposed to be.
Droster
The Cape Colony word for “runaway.” From the Dutch, related to “drost”—bailiff, officer. The colonizers’ language, repurposed.
A Droster was someone who left. A fugitive slave, a free Black, an escaped convict, a rebel European, an indigenous person who refused to disappear. Anyone who decided that the colony’s rules no longer applied.
Drosters built new nations. Griqualand. Communities in mountain hideaways. Cooking fire constellations.
Droster is not just a historical term. It is a category of being. Anyone who refuses the terms offered and builds something else anyway.
Fugitive
One who flees. One who remains unfound.
But also: something that refuses to stay in its assigned place. Fugitive knowledge. Fugitive light. Fugitive mathematics—the kind that never made it into textbooks because the people who knew it were running.
The fugitive does not ask for permission. The fugitive does not wait for the door to open. The fugitive finds the door that was always there, disguised as a wall.
Information
Data with shape. The what, arranged.
Not just “how many runaways” but where they ran, who they ran with, what they built when they arrived. Information is stone arranged into a wall. Still not shelter—but closer.
Knowledge
Information with roots. The what, connected to the how and the why.
Knowledge knows that the spiral village works because the same pattern protects the child and the elder, the cooking fire and the nation. Knowledge is the wall you can lean on. The thing you can teach. The thing that survives you.
Other Knowledge Systems
The plural is the point.
Not “alternative” as if the western way is the default and everything else is a variation. Just other. Different. Complete on their own terms.
Fractal geometry embedded in corn rows before computers named it. Kinship mathematics in ballroom houses. Healing knowledge that never passed through a medical journal. Ways of knowing that don’t begin with Descartes.
Other knowledge systems don’t need translation into western terms to be real. They were real before the west arrived. They’ll be real after.
Queer
Not just who you love. Not just how you name yourself.
Queer is the refusal to fit the shape you were given. The insistence on building your own container. Queer is what happens when the available categories won’t hold you and you decide the categories are the problem.
The Drosters were queer. Not in the modern identity sense—in the structural sense. They didn’t fit. They left. They built something else.
Queer is the spiral where the straight line was supposed to be.
Queering
The verb. The action.
Queering is taking a thing designed for straight lines and finding its spiral. Queering art history means asking not “is this as good as European art” but “what was this for, who made it, who did it carry?” Queering mathematics means finding the fractal in the corn row, the iteration in the drum rhythm, the scaling in the kinship network.
Queering is not destroying the original. It’s revealing what was always there but couldn’t be seen through the old lens.
Radical
From the Latin radix—root.
Radical is not loud. Not extreme. Not angry by default. Radical is going to the root. Asking not “how do we fix this” but “what is this growing from.” Pulling up the whole plant instead of trimming the leaves.
The Drosters were radical. They didn’t ask for better treatment within the colony. They left the colony. They went to the root of the problem—which was the colony itself.
Runaway
The simplest word for it.
Someone who left. Someone who chose the mountain over the plantation, the cooking fire over the chain, the unknown over the known.
Runaway is not a victim word. It’s a movement word. It says: I am no longer where you put me.
Settler Colonizer
Not just someone who moves somewhere new.
A settler colonizer is someone who arrives and declares the land empty. Who builds their house and calls it civilization. Who looks at cooking fires on the mountain and sees not community but “problem to be solved.”
The settler colonizer’s project is replacement. Erasure. Making the world look like home so they don’t have to remember they left.
Drosters are what happens when replacement fails.
Wisdom
Knowledge that has lived. Knowledge that has been tested, suffered, passed down, sung about, cried over.
Wisdom is the wall that has sheltered ten generations. The pattern that still works even though no one remembers who first drew it. The cooking fire that has been lit so many times the stones themselves remember heat.
Wisdom knows when to speak and when to stay quiet. When to teach and when to let the learner find it themselves.
Wisdom is what the elders carry. What the grandmother braids into the child’s hair. What the ancestors whisper when you can’t sleep.
Taking Care of Prints
Fine art prints are like any artwork and should be handled carefully. There is no risk of smudging the ink when it is dry and the paper is not likely to absorb oil from your hands, though this can happen if you hold it too long or have dirty fingers.
We recommend storing the artwork in the envelope it was delivered in until you’re ready to frame it or hang it up. Use acid-free paper for storing otherwise. Also use acid-free mats for framing, and get help from a local expert for framing if necessary.