CONTRIBUTORS
From A to Z
Igshaan Adams’s
practice coalesces performance, weaving, sculpture and installation. Born in Bonteheuwel, a suburb in Cape Town, South Africa, Adams draws upon his background to contest racial, sexual and religious boundaries. This intersectional topography remains visible throughout his practice and serves as a palimpsest upon which traces of personal histories are inscribed and reinscribed. Adams approaches materiality through his own subjectivity. Often, cultural and religious references are used in conjunction with surfaces that have always been present throughout his life; thread, beads, wire, linoleum, cotton twine, fabric. His interest in the material oscillates between the intuitive process of handling different substances as well as a formal inquiry into how various materials behave in different contexts and how they transfigure or evolve depending. In 2018, Adams was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art.
Sigrid Adorf
is Professor of Art and Cultural Analysis at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland, where she also heads the Research Focus Cultural Analysis in the Arts. Sigrid studied at the Universities of Marburg and Bremen, Germany. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Bremen with a dissertation on video art and the specific subjectivity of women video artists in the 1970s. Her research explores how art and aesthetic practices can critically interrogate cultural constructions of the present. Her work focuses on artistic experimentation, visual culture, feminist and queer theory, media art, artistic research, and questions of visibility and representation. Since 2019, she has served as Head of the Research Focus Cultural Analysis in the Arts. She is a founding and editorial board member of the peer-reviewed open-access platform INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries (insert.art) and has led several Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) funded research projects. She currently directs the SNSF-funded research project Echoing the Un(fore)seen: Cultural-Analytical Listening in the Arts (2023-2027), which investigates listening as a critical cultural-analytical practice in contemporary artistic research.
Jeffrey Babcock
spent years hitchhiking around the United States and Europe, writing and absorbing. Spent a spell in prison, hung out with rastas and punks in 1980s Thatcheresque London. He landed in Amsterdam eventually, living in a squat near the harbor chopping wood all winter long and tossing the timber into a heater to keep warm. Dismayed by the commercialisation and gentrification of movie theatres at the turn of the century, he ignited a string of alternative cinemas that have zigzagged brightly through the city ever since. He believes in Giacometti, handwriting, roasted pumpkin seeds, Betty Boop, mahogany, pencil mustaches, walking on thin ice… and often wonders if Jonah ever became 25 in the year 2000 as prophesied.
Dini Sandiso Bazana
studies how race, racism, colonialism and state and corporate power shape work, organisations and everyday institutional life in South Africa and the wider Global South. Moving from traditional industrial and organisational psychology into critical organisation studies, he focuses on worker subjectivity, anti-Blackness and violence, and on how knowledge about work and management is produced, policed and globalised. PhD in Business Administration (organisation studies) Grenoble Ecole de Management. Lecturer in Organisational Psychology at Rhodes University.
Berkveldt
is a multidisciplinary art duo based in Rotterdam, consisting of Noëlle Ingeveldt and Juriaan van Berkel. In our practice, we explore how non-human perspectives can help make complex events tangible and felt. Our work is rooted in scientifically-based research and explores the interplay, complex relationships, and tensions that exist between the human and non-human world. We frequently work in dialogue with the scientific community, and through our artistic research, we develop immersive installations and magic-realist productions where film, sound, sculpture, and scenography converge. This multidimensional approach allows us to incorporate practical, local, and anecdotal knowledge, translating shifting paradigms into sensory experiences that invite reflection on urgent social and cultural themes. Noëlle Ingeveldt obtained her Bachelor’s degree at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and her Master of Arts at M.I.A.R.D. (Piet Zwart Institute / WdKA) in Rotterdam. Noëlle is a lecturer at the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU). Juriaan van Berkel obtained his Bachelor’s degree at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and his Master of Arts at the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU).
Lucienne Bestall
is a writer and curatorial researcher based in Cape Town. She holds a degree in Fine Art and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Lucienne has contributed to several art surveys from Phaidon, and her essay ‘All the Dead’ was included in the anthology Our Ghosts Were Once People (Jonathan Ball, 2022). Another essay, ‘A History of Fire’, was published by Raritan (Rutgers University, 2021) and is listed among the notable essays and literary non-fiction in The Best American Essays anthology (HarperCollins Publishers, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Image, Asia Art Archive, TPCReview, and Denver Quarterly, among others. Lucienne’s debut collection of essays, Except for Breath: Reflections on Image and Memory (2025), is published by Karavan Press.
Piotr Bockowski
aka fung neo, is a London based philosopher of posthumanities, body performer and video artist. A curator of Chronic Illness events at a biocontaminated sewage space, he has performed and shown his work in Europe, China, USA, Canada & Japan. Director of short films: ‘Bottom of the Well’, ‘Ogled’, ‘Ancestor Parasite’, ‘Nekama’, ‘Gunkanjima’ & ‘Invert Balcony’. He taught media theory at London universities, including Goldsmiths (University of London) & LCC (UAL), as well as as a guest lecturer at Kingston University. Author of philosophy and SF books: ‘Fungi Media’ (Open Humanities Press), ‘Feed the Hole’, ‘Nekama’ and ‘Escape is a Trap’. His art criticism and speculative fictions have been published in CLOT, Inertia, Mousai, Guts and Posthuman Magazine
Allan Aubrey Boesak
(born 23 February 1946) is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric and politician and anti-apartheid activist. Along with Beyers Naudé and Winnie Mandela, Boesak won the 1985 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award given annually by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to an individual or group whose courageous activism is at the heart of the human rights movement and in the spirit of Robert F. Kennedy’s vision and legacy.
Mphutlane wa Bofelo
is a political scientist whose scholarship examines the intersections of politics, governance, and development in Africa. As poet, essayist, and playwright, his work brings the personal, political, and spiritual into dialogue-woven through African aesthetic traditions and animated by the improvisational rhythms of jazz.
Omoseye Bolaji
was born in Ibadan, Nigeria where he attended the Obafemi Awolowo University. He grew up abroad and developed an eclectic reading habit influenced by comics, popular thrillers, African authors like Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Western classics. Bolaji relocated to South Africa, where he became a pivotal figure in the renaissance of Free State black writing starting in the early 2000s, authoring over fifteen books by 2011 and mentoring emerging local authors, which led to the publication and distribution of more than fifty works by black writers through provincial libraries. He published a great deal of fiction, poetry, drama, literary appreciation, and other general works. He was the creator and writer of the “Tebogo Mokoena Mystery series”. Among his accolades for writing, Bolaji was conferred with the Chancellor’s Medal by the University of the Free State (2007), and the “Exquisite Calabash” at Ikire, Nigeria (2020). His fiction, often in the form of short novels or novelettes, emphasized realism, local color, suspense, and moral themes drawn from everyday experiences of poverty, shebeens, and township dynamics, targeting black readers for broad accessibility rather than academic critique. Mr. Bolaji passed away on 22 May 2022 at the age of 57.
Sezgin Boynik
is a sociologist and art theorist. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Helsinki platform Rab-Rab Press and a co-founder of the publishing house Pykë/Shuplak-Shuplak Press based in Prizren. He has completed his Ph.D. in Jyväskylä University Social Science department on the topic of Cultural Politics of Black Wave in Yugoslavia from 1963 to 1972. He has been publishing on punk, the relation between aesthetics and politics, on cultural nationalism, Situationist International, and Yugoslavian cinema. Co-edited reader Nationalism and Contemporary Art (with Minna L. Henriksson, Rhizoma & EXIT, Prishtina, 2007), and co-authored book on History of Punk and Underground in Turkey, 1978-1999 (with Tolga Guldalli, BAS, Istanbul, 2008). He is founder and editor of Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art. (2017)
Alésha Bredell
is a researcher and recent PhD graduate in Visual Arts (Visual Studies) from Stellenbosch University, affiliated with the AVReQ research unit. Her work explores the ways in which art functions as a tool for entering into conversations around troubled and contested histories, with a particular focus on the archive, restitution, and addressing colonial legacies in the South African context. Her doctoral research explored the intersection of critically engaged, art-informed research, memory, and epistemic justice, with a particular focus on the importance of embodied, deeply rooted, site-specific knowledge in addressing colonial legacies and marginalised histories. With a strong interest in living archives, as explored in previous research, her focus as an art scholar is on finding ways to bring our deeply troubled histories to life in the present.
Njabulo Chipangura
is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology with an interest in empirical ways by which museum practices can be decolonised through epistemic and aesthetic disobedience benchmarked by undoing earlier ways of knowledge production particularly looking at African collections and their representations. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, an MA in Museums and Heritage Studies, from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and a BA Hons in Archaeology, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. Njabu has published several research papers that looks at ongoing debates around the coloniality of museums and associated knowledge production and representation practices, to imagine a decolonised museum in Africa. His first co-written book entitled Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum was published by Routledge in April 2021. Njabu sits on the editorial board of Museum International a widely read journal on museum practices and theory which is published Routledge in collaboration with the International Council of Museums (ICOM). He is also a managing editor on Museum and Society published by University of Leicester Open Journals. Njabu is currently working on a co-edited volume entitled The Museologies of Africa: Rethinking African Museums, Community Inclusion, Living Cultures and Decolonisation which will be published by Routledge in 2026.
Rina Garcia Chua
(she/siya) is a creative and critical scholar from the Philippines who is currently based in British Columbia, Canada. She is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, an Affective Currents Environmental Humanities Institute Fellow with the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, and she received her PhD from the University of British Columbia. Rina is the editor of Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (UST Publishing House, 2018), and co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is also co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Her current scholarly book manuscript develops the framework of a migrant reading practice in analyzing curations, collations, and anthologies of literary and visual cultures, while her in-progress poetry chapbook, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards, is a visual and poetic response to migrant and arrivant cultures, liminal environments, and violences of form and language.
André S. Clements
André S. Clements (1973, Pretoria) photographs Johannesburg mostly at night and keeps some of the receipts. His practice (including painting, photography, code and writing) is documented in a public repository as an artist’s book in the form of software documentation and commit logs. He lives and works in Johannesburg.
David Critchley
was born in 1953. He studied at Stockport College, Newcastle Upon Tyne Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, London. One of the organisers of the influential series of installations and media performances at 2B Butler’s Wharf in the late 1970s, Critchley was also a central figure in the organisation of London Video Arts from its inception in 1976, and as manager between 1981-86. He taught video at the Slade, Chelsea and Croyden and was a visiting lecturer at many UK art colleges in the late 70s and early 80s. His video artworks were screened widely in the UK, in Europe, North America and worldwide. After LVA he formed and ran the video production company Greenstreet Ltd until 1991. Now an art teacher, his work combines video, photography and installations such as ‘Cradle to Grave’, a permanent exhibit in the Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum made in collaboration with Pharmacopoeia-art.
Nicola Deane
is an artist working with organic and digital materials to produce fine art and audiovisual installations. She obtained her BFA & MFA with distinction from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. In 2021 she was awarded a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University for her project titled Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories, which explored a site of cultural heritage through a decolonial feminist lens and is published by the online cultural journal herri. She has performed, screened and exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and is currently a Postdoc Fellow of the Africa Open Institute working on the project Decay without mourning: future-thinking heritage practices.
Peter Delpeut
is a writer and cinematographer. His film Felice… Felice… (1998) came out in the same year as his eponymous debut novella; his mosaic film Diva Dolorosa (1999), about Italian film divas between 1913 and 1920, was accompanied by an essayistic travel book of the same name. He has also published De Grote Bocht, Kleine filosofie van het fietsen (The Great Curve, reflections on cycling, 2003) and Het Vergeten Seizoen (Forgotten Season, 2007). Besides his artistic work, Delpeut is a longtime film journalist; he also previously served as the deputy director of the Dutch Film Museum.
Sazi Dlamini
is a senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu Natal specialising in bow music, Jazz and African music. His passion for traditional South African music speaks through his performance on traditional Nguni instruments including bows, drums and flutes and various other African musical instruments. As an advocate for indigenous music he was the convener of the 1st International Bow Music Conference in Durban in 2016. His scholarly and performance interests include indigenous musical bows, South African popular music history, free-improvisation, new music and children’s indigenous musical performance. He composes and performs on ugubhu, umakhweyana, umqangala and uhadi musical bows and builds flutes, traditional harps from bamboo, reed, horn, calabash and recycled materials. He is founder of the International Bow Music Conference and Insurrections Ensemble and is currently Senior Research Fellow for the ReCentering AfroAsia Project.
Alexandra Dodd
is a multi-genre writer and editor who has contributed texts to numerous books, art catalogues, monographs and exhibition projects that bring together visual, literary and archival cultures – particularly in “post”-colonial, “post”-apartheid and “post”-traumatic contexts. These include The interpreters: South Africa’s new non-fiction (Soutie Press, 2025), Johannes Phokela: Only Sun in the sky knows how I feel (a lucid dream) (Zeitz MOCAA, 2023) and An anthology of non-conformism: Rebel wom!n, words, ways and wonders (DIO Press, 2024). She is the author of David Goldblatt: The last interview (Steidl, 2019), the editor of Nicola Brandt’s The distance within (Steidl, 2025) and a co-editor of Stockholm cosmologies (Liljevalchs, 2025) and Radical solidarity: A reader (Zeitz MOCAA, 2023), among others. She holds a Master of Arts (Creative Writing) from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and a PhD in Literature from the University of Cape Town. She is drawn to texts with an essayistic, social-documentary heft, exploring themes like embodiment, memoir, social spectres, emergent ecologies, interspecies subjectivity and the connections between human and more-than-human life worlds.
uZandile Joy wakwaDywati
is a PhD candidate in the Psychology Department and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest at Stellenbosch University. Her work is embodied through critical engagement with the question of race/ racialization/ and racism and its intersection to gendered subjectivities, particularly masculinities studies in post-colonial-apartheid in South Africa. She is interested in the existential question of blackness, and black masculinities in township, on which her PhD is centered. A question that tarries with Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness and his anguish about the death and loss of black manhood in Townships.
Dave Edwards
was born in Johannesburg in 1955 and went to high school in Pretoria. Dave’s family was stacked with teachers and he has spent most of his adult life engaged in teaching, and developing people. He studied history at Wits and tends, as a result, to attempt to see the world dispassionately, witnessing it without judging the changes which surround us, treating the city as a source of primary evidence of how things are and understanding our roots. After facilitating managerial development all over Africa, Dave retired and now has more time for photography. Edwards has taken photographs since he was a boy growing up in the platteland. Joburg, where he has lived for the last fifty years, has had two exhibitions and co-published a book of his photographs.
Dominique Edwards
is a visual artist based in Cape Town. She works primarily in sculpture. Her practice is concerned with material processes that involve paper, plaster and ink. She lectures in drawing, photography and sculpture and holds an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art (2012). In 2021 she launched Sessions, a support programme for visual artists, currently in its 6th iteration.
Garth Erasmus
is a visual artist and musician whose work focuses on SA’s First Nation people, the KhoiSan, which is his heritage. Originally from the Eastern Cape he now lives and works in Kraaifontein (outside Cape Town). He is a former teacher at the Zonnebloem Children’s Art Centre, District Six in Cape Town. He is a former chairperson of Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI) and during the 80’s and 90’s was an active member of the art projects Vakalisa and Community Reflections. He is one of the founding artists of Greatmore Street Artists Studio, and the Thupelo Artists Workshop (Cape Town). One of his large-scale mural artworks is included in an installation depicting first peoples at Artscape Theatre, Cape Town. His audio installation, Autshomato, is at the Robben Island Museum (Nelson Mandela Gateway, Cape Town). Garth is part of the activist music and poetry group, Khoi Khonnexion. Garth’s visual art is represented by Koena Art Institute. Garth is a member of the Khoisan Gypsy Band whose theatre production Die Poet Wie’s Hy? on the work of Adam Small won Best Production at the STELLENBOSCH WOORDFEES 2020. His visual art has been extensively collected by the Smithsonian Institute of African Art in Washington, USA. In 2024 a selection of Garth’s recorded music was published by the German company Tal Records as a vinyl LP titled: THRENODY FOR THE KHOISAN. Garth was one of the artists included in the German-South Africa group exhibition OSCILLATIONS at Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2024.
Wolfgang Ernst
was full professor for Media Theories at Humboldt University in Berlin until his retirement in autumn 2024, where he founded the seminar for Media Science. He received his doctorate in history, then focused on media studies and cultural studies. Since his research turn towards media archaeology, he has devoted his writings and teaching primarily to theories of the archive, media temporalities and sonic media processes. He is currently exploring the intra-technical technológos of cultural knowledge.
Federico Federici
has a degree in Physics at the University of Genoa (Italy) in 2000 with the thesis: Influence of refractive-index mismatch in high-resolution three-dimensional confocal microscopy. He was researcher in the field of Biophysics, Confocal and Multiphoton Microscopy within the INFM framework at DIFI Genoa University until 2004. His scientific fields of interest are applications of group theory to physics, biophysics, confocal laser microscopy, cybernetics, digital image processing, coding, neural networks, two-photon microscopy. His artistic fields of interest are poetry, visual poetry, conceptual writing, linguistic transgressions, medial transgressions, asemic writing, translation, critics, painting, video art, installations.
Steven J. Fowler
is a writer, poet, artist and performer who lives in London. His work explores an expansive idea of poetry and literature in relationship with contemporary art. It explores the textual, visual, asemic, concrete, sonic, collaborative, performative, improvised, curatorial – through 50 publications, 400 performances in over 40 countries, 4 large scale event programs, numerous commissions, collaborations and more.
Abigail George
is the proud winner of the 2023 Sol Plaatje EU Poetry Prize. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. Her poem “Rebirth” received an Honourable Mention in the New Coin Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two grants from the National Arts Council, one from the Centre of the Book and another from ECPACC. She was educated in Port Elizabeth, and Swaziland. She is the Contributing Editor for African Writer Magazine, based in New Jersey, and an editor at Mwanaka Media and Publishing, based in Zimbabwe. Her poems on the Palestinian genocide have appeared in Critical Muslim, and the anthologies “White Kites Over Gaza, Woven Tales of Palestine ”, “We Are All Palestinians”, “Unsilenced: Poems for Palestine”, and “Butterflies in Gaza: A World Anthology of Poems on Peace.” She has published seven collections of poetry. Her latest poetry collection is “Did You Get Married to Her When I was in the Mental Hospital”. (Publisher: Ivor W. Hartmann of ZamaShort, Zimbabwe).
Tania Haberland
is a transnational poet and artivist born in South Africa to Mauritian and German parents, and raised between Arabian deserts, Indian Ocean coastlines, and colder cities elsewhere. She works across page, spoken word, and live art, moving between ecopoetics, embodied language, and what she calls the “technology of tenderness”: a practice where language becomes tenderly fierce against violence, speaks to power through the vulnerability of love, and tentatively listens back to the silenced world. Her debut collection, Hyphen (UCT Writers, 2009), won the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2010. PS Free Palestine Free us all.
Laurence Hamburger
is a South African filmmaker and writer. His work is mostly an engagement with the fluidity between documentary and fiction. He is particularly interested in the murky delta of politics and storytelling in pop culture. While probably best known as a globally recognized director of TV commercials, he has also produced, in collaborations with a number of established fine artists, a series of both long and short form film projects for museums and private collections. His re-printed collection of SA newspaper posters, the cult book Frozen Chicken Train Wreck, is now being extended into a website archive, an exhibition, and in an ironic nod to the self-obsession of Social Media, an AI agent who offers to turn your personality into front page news.
Steven Craig Hickman
philosopher blogger; very intelligent guy in terms of articulation; a prolific Facebook blogger, and has his own WordPress blog as well: «Social Ecologies»—the latter’s first post dating from September 2012. He sometimes blogs about Nick Land, and occasionally has commented on Nick Land’s Weblog Xenosystems.
Maija Hirvanen
is a choreographer and performance maker based in Helsinki. Her performances have been presented at e.g. SPRING Festival/Utrecht, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis and Dansens Hus/Stockholm. She makes performances on stages and in places, writes, researches, and teaches. Maija was the in-house choreographer at Zodiak – Center for New Dance from 2013–15. She is was a THIRD Research Fellow at DAS Graduate School, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam 2021-2024. Hirvanen is the Artistic Professor in Dance 2024-2028, an honorary title granted by Performing Arts Council / Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Maija is a Doctoral Researcher at University of the Arts Helsinki / Theatre Academy. Maija’s interests range from the relationship between art and different belief systems and ways of re-learning to questions of embodiment and the more-than-human in performance and choreography. Hirvanen has a BA in interdisciplinary performing arts (Turku Art Academy & Dartington College of Arts/Performance Writing) and MA in Visual Culture (Helsinki School for Arts and Design/Aalto University).
Dr. Hanna B. Hölling
is Research Professor at HKB Bern University of the Arts and Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum Zurich. Her research examines the history and theory of conservation, contemporary art, critical heritage, and infrastructures of care. Moving beyond object-centered models of preservation, her research develops conservation as a transdisciplinary practice of care engaging human and more-than-human worlds. She has published widely on performance, media art, and changeable artworks, including two volumes of Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (Routledge, 2023 & 2024), Activating Fluxus (Routledge, 2026), and Paik’s Virtual Archive: Time, Change and Materiality in Media Art (University of California Press, 2017). Hölling leads international research projects on performance, Fluxus, and Critical Conservation. She currently develops the framework of “Caring for Naturecultures,” exploring glaciers, environmental infrastructures, and hybrid heritage forms as natureculture assemblages. Her most recent work connects art, science, and ecology through questions of permanence, material transformation, and heritage futures.
Meghan Ho-Tong
is an architect, researcher, and lecturer at the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town. Her work uses multidisciplinary modes of practice, including filmmaking, to investigate structures of dominion and extraction in the built environment, while attending to colonial silences of ‘othered’ histories of the Global South. Her films include ‘Chorus’ (2021) co-produced for MAXXI Museum’s exhibition ‘Buone Nuove’ and selected for Arquiteturas Film Festival Porto (2022). She co-edited the publication Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa (2022) supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation 2021 FOCAL POINT Publishing Grant. She participated in the 2023 Jaap Bakema Study Centre annual conference ‘Architecture Archives of the Future’ as a contributor to the session ‘Decoloniality’ with the paper ‘Reading Sino-African Archives: Expanding Histories of the South’, and in the 2024 conference ‘Staying With Modernity? (Dis)Entangling Coloniality and Architecture’ as session chair of ‘Extraction Infrastructures’. In 2024, she was awarded the NWO ‘Research into Collections with a Colonial Context’ grant to develop the project ‘Moving Materials: Architecture, Extraction and Colonial Railway Infrastructures in South Africa’ with co-applicant Dr. Alejandro Campos Uribe, in collaboration with the Nieuwe Instituut and TU Delft, where she was a Visiting Researcher in 2025-2026.
Fanie Jason
was born on the 15 May 1953, Heathfield, Cape Town. Under the South African Group Areas Act, Jason’s family was forced to move to the black township of Guguletu in 1960. Jason’s interest in photography developed after borrowing a friend’s camera as a teenager. He started work as a freelance photographer in 1975 to supplement his income as a bible salesman. Jason’s photography career took off in the early eighties when he worked for Drum and Pace magazine in Cape Town. Jason’s photographs have appeared in most South African newspapers: Die Burger, Cape Times, Cape Argus, Rapport, Sunday Times, City Press and Tribute Magazine. Some of his photographs have also appeared in international publications such as Time Magazine, London Times, Observer, Guardian, Daily Mail and The Evening Standard. Jason’s assignments have enabled him to travel extensively. He covered the first democratic elections across South Africa in 1994. He has documented genocide in Rwanda, street children in Rio de Janeiro, the conflicts of the West Banks and the crisis in Kosovo. Jason has taken part in various exhibitions nationally and internationally and in 1999 he won several photo awards including the prestigious Adbul Sharif award. The following year, on of Jason’s picture essays won South Africa’s Fuji Press Award.
Siphokazi Jonas
is a multi-award-winning poet, playwright, actor, and producer based in South Africa. She holds an MA in English Literature and a BA in Drama and English. She is the author of Weeping Becomes a River which was awarded 2024 The Book Lounge Book of the Year, listed among the 100 Notable African Books of 2024, and joint winner of the 2025 HSS Award for Best Poetry. The book was also awarded the 2025 UJ Debut Prize and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her upcoming children’s book, Oli and the Island of Intsomi, will be published by Penguin Random House South Africa in August, 2026.
Andile Khumalo
is a South African composer, scholar and Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he teaches composition, orchestration and music theory. His creative and scholarly work explores timbre, musical temporality, African approaches to sound organisation, and the relationships between listening, memory, identity and ancestral presence. His compositions have been performed internationally by ensembles including the WDR Sinfonieorchester, Ensemble Modern and Ensemble Dal Niente, and presented at festivals such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, ECLAT and Wien Modern. His album Tracing Hollow Traces received the 2025 NIHSS Award for Best Composition. Khumalo’s recent publications include “The Current Situation of an African Composer” in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press) and “A Functional Approach to Sound Organization in African Music” in The Oxford Handbook of Orchestration Studies (Oxford University Press, 2026). He was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in 2023.
Hyunggyu Kim
is a Luxembourg/Germany-based Korean architect whose work, including his ongoing research Jansang (잔상): Afterimages of Decay, explores the generative potential of architectural ruin. Trained across the US and Europe, Kim develops speculative/democratic methodologies that frame impermanence and decay as catalysts for spatial and collective permanence.
Knee Deep In Custard
is a music and visual performance duo (Abigail Meekel and Claire Meekel) blending live vocals, piano, bass, and electronic compositions, often accompanied by projected visuals. Their signature performances feature projections on a thin screen in front of them, with the duo performing behind it, almost invisible. They describe their music as sounding like “the memories of the past, a funny walk, or tears falling on the piano.” They collaborate with Hommybird in some of their songs. Photo courtesy of Yaël Temminck.
Gauta Komane
worked for Bophuthatswana Department of justice and later the ANC as policy researcher. He’s a member of ActionSA and an independent development practitioner.
Tsogo Kupa
is a writer and internationally award-winning filmmaker based in Johannesburg. He is also a contributing editor to Africa Is a Country.
Dr Lizabé Lambrechts
is a South African heritage practitioner, archivist, and musicologist. She is Executive Director of Nuuseum, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving and providing access to South Africa’s cultural heritage through large-scale digitisation, digital preservation, and online access initiatives. She also serves as an Extraordinary Associate Professor at the Africa Open Institute, where her work focuses on archives, memory, heritage, and digital humanities. Lambrechts previously led the Hidden Years Music Archive Project and served as Director of Archives at Africa Open. Her research and public-facing projects explore how archives can foster new forms of engagement, access, and knowledge production. Lambrechts is currently the Research Director of Decay Without Mourning: Future Thinking Heritage Practices, an international research collaboration funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Her contribution to the project focuses on the relationship between decay, archives, and memory, arguing that deterioration and loss can reveal histories of care, custodianship and cultural responsibility that often remain invisible within conventional preservation narratives. Through collaborative research, public engagement initiatives and curatorial practice, she explores how archives are shaped not only by what is preserved, but also by what fades and disappears. This research informed the 2026 exhibition Deaccessioned, which examined decay as a material, aesthetic, and ethical force within contemporary heritage practice.
Florencia Levy
(Buenos Aires, 1979) is a renowned visual artist and educator with training from Central Saint Martin’s College of Arts (London) and the National University of the Arts (Buenos Aires). She has participated in prestigious artist residencies worldwide, including in Japan, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. Notable achievements include the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2020 and 2015), the Konex Award – Art and Technology 2022, and the 10th Lichter Art Award (Frankfurt, 2021). Her work is featured in major institutional collections, such as the National Museum of Fine Arts (Argentina) and the POLIN Museum (Poland). Currently, she co-directs the Bachelor’s Degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices at UNSAM.
Kati Lindström
is a scholar in environmental humanities whose work examines how geopolitics, cultural stereotypes, and personal identities shape perceptions and management of natural and cultural heritage. Her research focuses on the past and present of conservation decisions in Antarctica, Japan, and Estonia. Trained as an environmental anthropologist at the University of Kyoto and as a semiotician at the University of Tartu, she is currently a docent of the history of science, technology, and the environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), specialising in environmental humanities and the uses of history. Lindström also contributes extensively to international scholarly and policy networks related to environmental history and polar heritage, serving as the Vice-President of the ICOMOS International Polar Heritage Committee, Vice-Chair of the Polar Research Committee of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and National Contact Point for the Republic of Estonia to the Antarctic Treaty. Beyond academia, she is a literary translator working from Japanese to Estonian, having rendered works by Murakami Haruki, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Matsuo Bashō.
Brenton Maart
is an independent curator, writer, designer and artist whose practice brings together contemporary art and science, and environmental and social justice. Trained in both biotechnology and fine art, he has spent more than three decades developing projects that cross disciplinary boundaries, creating exhibitions, publications, public programmes and visual campaigns that use culture as a catalyst for critical dialogue and social change. His work explores the complex relationships between ecology, politics, memory and identity. Most recently, as the founding curator of Bioart + Design Africa at the University of Johannesburg, he has led a number of internationally collaborative projects examining the intersections of biotechnology, contemporary art and indigenous knowledge systems. These include the exhibitions Sym/Bio/Art, Imminent and Eminent Ecologies and Re:Fuse-Ability, along with the multinational Fluid Boundaries residency programme linking practitioners across Africa, Europe and South America. As a writer and editor, he has contributed extensively to South African art discourse through exhibition catalogues, monographs, journals and art criticism. Maart’s own artistic practice, encompassing photography, archival research, bio-art and, more recently, ceramics, investigates themes of transformation, memory and materiality.
Ithumeleng Mahabane
holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of the Witwatersrand. He currently serves as the Chair of the Board of the Social Justice Initiative, an Independent Director at the Institute for Economic Justice, and as a trustee of the Waterford Kamhlaba Foundation of South Africa. During his 20-year tenure at The Brunswick Group, Mahabane provided executive-level advice and counsel on significant corporate actions, strategy, and transformation. He has guided South African and international companies in demonstrating their financial, economic, and public value creation. Before joining Brunswick, Mahabane was a financial journalist for various South African publications, including the Mail and Guardian, Sunday Times, Business Times, Financial Mail, and Business Day. He authored a political economy column for the latter three publications and contributed to several books on political economy.
Songeziwe Mahlangu
was born in Alice in 1985. He matriculated from Dale College, in King William’s Town, and went on to do a business science degree at the University of Cape Town. He returned to university to do a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Rhodes, Grahamstown, in 2011. Penumbra is the end result of that degree and his first novel. Songeziwe currently lives in East London and works at a large accountancy firm.
David Maisel
is an artist whose work spans photography, painting, and video. He is the recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, among other awards and honors. Maisel’s aerial photographs address the aesthetics and environmental impact of radically human-altered landscapes, while his abstract paintings respond to catastrophic climate change events such as wildfire and flood. His images are spatially ambiguous and destabilizing, and describe a world wholly remade by human activity.
Io Makandal
(b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working with drawing, photography, organic matter and installation, her practice is concerned with feminist and environmental embodiments of process, entropy, urban ecology, and hybrid environments during a time of environmental shift. She has exhibited both locally and internationally and her work is a part of several private, public and institutional collections.
Slovo Mamphaga’s
works seek to reflect on society social ills which overlaps between spiritual and political elements that are inherent within South African society. He uses imaginary surrealism depiction to address themes such as identity in his work. Coming from a background of design Slovo’s work is experimental, process led. His compositions are detailed and expressive to communicate experiences that he absorbs from daily life and consequently questions through his work. His composition include drawings, paintings and prints. “In an effort to create art that is utilitarian and memorable my work seeks to find new ways to re-define Afrocentric narratives.”
Geoff Manaugh
Geoff Manaugh is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer, covering topics related to cities, design, crime, infrastructure, technology, and more for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, The New Yorker, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Financial Times Magazine, New Scientist, Cabinet Magazine, The Daily Beast, Wired UK, and many other publications. His is also the co-author, with journalist Nicola Twilley, of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine (2021, MCD Books), and, in 2016, Geoff published A Burglar’s Guide to the City (FSG Originals), on the relationship between crime and architecture.
Marisa Maré
is an artist and educator based in the Western Cape whose practice engages environmental concerns, with a particular focus on climate change, materiality, and ecological grief. Working across sculpture, installation, and site-responsive practices, she explores the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds through material transformation, foregrounding decay, instability, and co-production. In 2024, Maré completed a Master’s degree in Visual Arts (with distinction) at the University of Johannesburg. Her dissertation investigated plastic as both material and agent, developing bioplastic as a low-impact sculptural material. Her recent solo exhibition, Making and Unmaking: Plastic Matters, explored ecological grief through experimental bioplastic artworks derived from natural and agricultural waste.
Sam Mathe
is an award-winning South African journalist, publisher, archivist, researcher, poet, historian and author with a particular interest in the history of South African theatre, music and literature. He’s the founding editor of Jazz Life Magazine and contributing author of South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs (2010), Brenda Fassie: I’m Not Your Weekend Special (2014), Joburg Noir (2010) as well as CultureandtheLiberationStruggleinSouth Africa (2021). His book of South African musical biographies, From Kippie to Kippies: Group Portraits of SA Artists is published by Themba Books. His second book, a volume of poetry is titled When You Are Gone & Other Poems (2013). It was inspired by Covid-19 and lockdown. His latest book, Tsietsi Mashinini – The Elusive Hero of Soweto is due to be released by NB Publishers in June 2026.
Matiyin
is a full stack web developer specialized in making custom web experiences. He has more than 30 years of IT experience, working in the fields of 3D animation, art direction and executive management of video games before switching to web development more than 15 years ago. With roots in Amsterdam, Matiyin is a free roaming world citizen and based everywhere the web goes
Wamuwi Mbao
is an essayist and cultural critic. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Stellenbosch University. He writes on literature, pop culture, and politics and is a literary reviewer for the Johannesburg Review of Books. His short story ‘The Bath‘ was named as one of the 20 best short stories written during the two decades of South Africa’s democracy. He is co-convenor of the FicSci science writing project, and co-editor of the FicSci anthologies Flow (2023), and Night Sky (2024). He is also the editor of Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poetry of Decolonization (2021).
Mkhulu Mbazo
is the wind beneath the wings of Msizi ka Isaac ka Wilson Moshoetsi. A spiritual analyst writing from the House of Phembumlilo, he is the (Inter) National Editor of a spiritual movement, The Book of Abantu and also the writer of a book by the same name. He is the composer of the spoken word, “Lalelani” (mkhulumbazo1). He is passionate about the concepts of “donation”, “Ilima” (Letsema), selflessness and voluntarism as an economic system. At the time of the writing of this article, he is one of the more than seven million unemployed South Africans.
Francesco Mbele
is a multimedia artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa that continuously defies the description. Creative director, DJ, designer – model, photographer, culture archivist and so on – and in all these varying roles, Mbele has created a visual world that evolves through self-expression and identity.
Mbe Mbhele
is a writer and cultural worker, currently reading for his PhD at the University of Pretoria.
Hugh Mdlalose
was born in 1977, in Murchison, Port Shepstone, and raised in different parts of KwaZulu-Natal. He attended primary school at Amahlongwa and eDududu, and Bhethani where he had his high school education. Hugh studied fine art in Pretoria and, later, photography at the Market Photo Workshop in downtown Johannesburg. Mdlalose’s work is a way of making sense of life through the camera click, the haunting, black and proud songs of black affirmation and redemption. It’s an effort to forge a common human bond—love songs resonating in one beat.
Abi Meekel
is a multidisciplinary artist who lived and studied in Johannesburg (2004–2020) before returning to Amsterdam. Graduating with Honours in Film & Television (Audiovisual Design) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2019, Abi exhibited installation works before expanding into freelance practice across film, animation, and interactive media. Their work includes graphic and motion design, cinematography, editing, compositing, visual effects, sound design, and music scoring. In 2019, a co-directed film was showcased at Rencontres Internationales Berlin/Paris, while The Game AfterHOURS—for which Abi composed the music and engineered the sound—won Best Game and received an IGF nomination.
Jurgen Meekel
is an audiovisual artist, filmmaker, and designer who studied Audiovisual Art at the Rietveld Academy after initial training in graphic design. Working across disciplines, his practice encompasses installation, sculpture, animation, graphic and motion design, cinematography, post-production, VFX, and sound. Recent projects include AV projection designs for theatre productions. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with work held in the collection of the Utrecht Central Museum for Modern Art. He has been teaching filmmaking at the Wits School of Arts since 2010. Through moving-image and sonic landscapes, his art practice and published research explore the intersections of science and art. He is also part of the design team of herri.
Walter Mignolo
is William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature; and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. His books related to these topics include: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995); Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), The Idea of Latin America (2006), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis co-authored with Catherine Walsh (2018) and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021).
Adam Mirza
is Associate Professor of Composition, Music Department, Emory University. As a sound artist and composer, Adam Mirza uses the laptop to fragment and recombine sounds and video in live performance. His work has been presented at international festivals for experimental electronic music including SEAMUS (US), NYCEMF(US), Technomancie II (France), RES (Italy), ICMC (Chile), and NIME (Shanghai). He performs regularly with Akiva Zamcheck as part of their genre-bending electronic music duo Fake Radiolab, at venues and festivals in NYC, Chicago, Miami, Utah, and Serbia. The topic of Fake Radiolab’s forthcoming album is the authoritative voice in contemporary media genres like podcasts and YouTube videos, whose conventions are referenced and subverted through exaggeration and parody.
Simphiwe Mlambo
is an interdisciplinary artist and architectural researcher whose work centres on the relationship between space, memory, and Black geographies. Their practice engages with questions of land, borders, and spatial imaginaries. Holding an M.Arch (Distinction) from the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), Johannesburg, Mlambo has investigated forms of resistance across African cities and their diasporas through research, artistic production, teaching, and curatorial work. As a teaching assistant at the GSA, their practice extends beyond academia, contributing to contemporary artistic practices and critical spatial discourse. Recognised as one of Scape Magazine’s “100 Voices in Design” (2024), they participated in the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg’s Emerging Practice (EP2) programme (2024) and Power Talks (2021). In 2023, they collaborated on the exhibition Ecospheres at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation. At the RGC Global Blackness Summer School (2022), they presented a sonic cartography of their dissertation in the panel “Geographies of Care” with Tina Campt. They worked with the WAI Think Tank on the project From Landgrab to Landback (2023) and are currently affiliated with the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), researching spatial transformations. In 2024, they joined the Young Black Academics Research Collective.
Tsholofelo Moche
is a South African artist, writer, and educator whose practice explores questions of memory, identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance. He currently teaches Fine Art at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, where his research and creative work engage the intersections of personal history, family archives and Black South African experiences.
Neith Moore
is a PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg, where her research weaves artistic practice with ecological inquiry. Situated in the iPhithi Nature Reserve, her thesis, Spatial Fabulations: Narratives of Death, Decay and Decomposition, explores mortality, imperceptibility, and the spectral entanglements of human and more-than-human worlds. Through installations, images, “art as speculative science” (SciArt), and material storytelling, Moore stages molecular and affective processes of transformation, blurring boundaries between life, death, and ecological becoming. Her work positions Practice-led Research as both method and knowledge, where poetic intervention and scientific thinking converge. Forthcoming publications include “Sym-ulated Fabulations” for the Symposium at the Centre for the Study of the Eco-weird (Penn State) and “Woven Fabulations” for Image and Text (University of Pretoria).
Lethokuhle Msimang
is a poet and writer born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. She graduated with a BA in Literary Studies and Creative Arts at the American University of Paris, completed an MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. More recently, graduated with an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College. Her work has been featured in New Coin, New Contrast, Grocott’s Mail, Hanging Loose, The Paris Atlantic, Il Tolomeo, The Clamantis, and Stanzas (among others). The Frightened is her debut novella, published by Karavan Press. At Swatch Art Peace Hotel, she completed Soil and Grass – an filmic exploration of traditional crafters in KZN. She will soon begin her PhD in Africana Studies at Cornell University.
Thokozani Mthiyane
is a Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of The Enso Circle. Raised in Clermont Township near Durban, his artistic journey was shaped by time spent in the studios of renowned painters Sfiso KaMkame and Thami Jali. Their mentorship influenced his early creative development, setting the foundation for his expressive and philosophical approach to art. Mthiyane’s work spans painting, poetry, music, and dance, reflecting his deep engagement with artistic storytelling. He gained early experience in children’s theatre with the Madcaps Educational Theatre Company and held his first solo exhibition at the Flat Gallery in Durban. His journey as a trilingual poet and performer has taken him across the world, including performing French poetry translated into isiZulu at Cave Poésie in Toulouse and touring with the Inzalo dance company in Holland.
Siyamthanda-Muhle Muyanga
is a second-year Humanities student at Stellenbosch University, a creative and thinker exploring the meaning of Blackness, the influence of language, and the spaces where disciplines meet and diverge. A Vensters 2026-winning creative and Project Manager, she moves fluidly across her interests, shaped by her experience as a Junior Councillor and Chairperson of Environment at the City of Johannesburg, as well as her recognition among South Africa’s Top 100 entrepreneurs in the Allan Gray Entrepreneurship Challenge (2023). As a Research Assistant at NHU Space, she engages critically with questions of epistemology, meaning, and being umuntu, representing a Gen-Z reimagining of what it means to know and to think — indlela entsha yokwazi nokucabanga.
Mnqobi Ngubane
studies land and agrarian reform in South Africa from the vantage point of the marginalised, landless Black majority and labouring classes, with wider interests in the Global South, and land redistribution globally. He is an executive producer of the 2026 South African Film and Television Award winning film, Mathonga Elizwe – Spirits of the Land, a lamentation of persistent land injustice in South Africa.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni
contributes to various national and international publications, The Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, The Johannesburg Review of Books. He also writes a column for the The Southern Cross and Spotlight.Africa. His historical novel, The Broken River Tent, has won the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Prize for South African writing in English. Ntabeni was also one of six writers from the African continent included in the collection of short stories, Africa Fresh! New Voices From The First Continent that was published in the US. He has worked with the Rhodes University Drama department to stage two plays which he wrote about the life and times of the Xhosa chiefs, Maqoma and his half brother Sandile. He is trained in the economics of built environment, reads history and literature as something more than a hobby. He’s particularly passionate about the South African Frontier history and the wars of land dispossession. Ntabeni lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and is married with children.
Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal
is a poet, playwright, translator and musician. His debut collection, asof geen berge ooit hier gewoon het nie, won the 2019 Ingrid Jonker Prize. His second collection, Ontaard, was awarded the Eugène Marais Prize and the NIHSS Award for Poetry, and his play Droomwerk was nominated for the Hertzog Prize for Drama. Odendaal is part of the 2024-cohort of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans and holds a PhD in Creative Writing. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town.
Joan Otieno
is an artist and activist living and working in Korogocho, an informal settlement in Nairobi. Joan creates striking works of art from waste materials, mainly discarded cans and plastic. Her portraits often depict women dressed in elaborate garments made from recycled materials. At Warembo Wasanii, the studio she runs, she teaches young girls from the settlement how to craft intricate costumes from plastic waste, banners, and metal cans, materials sourced from nearby landfills. But her work extends far beyond art. She has built a space that offers safety and empowerment to young women in an environment where they face constant threats. Her studio becomes a centre of creativity, mutual support, and solidarity.
Sean O’Toole
is an award-winning writer, journalist, editor and curator based in Cape Town. He has written extensively about art and culture for various print and online media globally. His most recent books are the non-fiction titles Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! (2026), a survey of South African photobooks since 1945, Irma Stern: African in Europe – European in Africa (2021), a biography of the modernist painter, and The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020), a New York Times notable art book of 2021. A disciple of the short form, his debut book was The Marquis of Mooikloof and Other Stories (2006), which included a work awarded the 2006 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award. He continues to publish short fiction, notably through his imprint Extemporary Press.
Marko Phiri
is a Zimbabwean writer whose work has appeared in numerous platforms, with his most recent contribution appearing in the short story anthology Zimbabwe by Bus edited by the indomitable Iren Stauton, formerly publisher of the now defunct Weaver Press.
Louise Potgieter
graduated with a Sculpture major from the Michaelis school of Fine Art in 2000. She spent the next 20 years recovering from the Conceptual, learning some real skills working in the Entertainment and Museum industry as a sculptor and scenic artist. She can pretty much make anything you can dream of. A few years ago she started making things that she herself dreams of. She teaches Pottery to small children to earn her bread, and tends to plants to soothe her spirit.
Lavi Ramphomane
is a blogger, a self-described perpetual student and social critic. His epistimological waywardness has attracted a large audience to his off-beat writings. Ramaphomane has been called the Charles Bukowski of Mzansi. He frequently publishes commentary on South African current events, ranging from the socioeconomic realities of crime and human trafficking to the complexities surrounding foreign nationals and gender-based violence.
Kopano Ratele
is Professor of Psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and head the Nhu Space for Critical and Creative Thought. He is the former director of the South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa’s Masculinity and Health Research Unit and former research professor at the University of South Africa. Among several roles he has played and positions held, Ratele was a member of the second Ministerial Committee on Transformation in South African Universities, former chairperson of Sonke Gender Justice, and former president of the Psychological Society of South Africa. Currently, he is on the management committee member of the Department of Science and Innovation-National Research Foundation (DSI-NRF) Centre of Excellence in Human Development and national advisory board member for the Department of Higher Education and Training Future Professors Programme. Ratele has a regular fatherhood feature on Wednesday night on SAFM’s The Meeting Point with Koketso Sachane. He has published extensively in South African and international journals on men and masculinity, African psychology, and decolonizing/decolonial psychology. His recent books include Why Men Hurt Women & Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity (2022) and The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019).
Julie Reshe
is a Ukrainian-born philosopher and the author of a negative psychoanalytic approach. With over 300 patients, she has extensive experience as a negative practitioner. Julie earned her PhD studying psychoanalysis at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts under the supervision of Alenka Zupančič. In addition, she studied existential therapy at the University of Oxford and hold certification as an APPA philosophical counselor. Reshe holds the position of a Visiting Professor at University College Cork and University College Dublin. She is also a Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Global Center for Advanced Studies. Her recent publications appeared in AEON, Springer, Everyday Analysis, Sublation Media, 3:am Magazine, Penumbr(a), The Philosophical Salon, knife.media, among others. Her latest books are Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive (Palgrave, 2023) and Death and Love: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives (co-edited with Todd McGowan, Routledge, 2025)
Donald Richie
who died aged 88 in 2013, wrote extensively on Japan, his adopted homeland after his arrival in 1947 with the US occupation forces. He was best known for his books on cinema, including The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1959), the first major English-language study of the subject; The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965); Ozu: His Life and Films (1974); and A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (2001). Richie played a pivotal role in introducing the director Yasujiro Ozu to foreign audiences and curated, in 1963, the first international Ozu retrospective, at the Berlin film festival. Though recognised as the most important figure in introducing Japanese cinema to the west, Richie saw himself as a writer foremost and a film critic secondarily. His fictional work includes Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai: A Historical Novel (1999), A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2004) and Tokyo Nights (2005). His interests stretched to topics as diverse as the country’s literature (Japanese Literature Reviewed, 2003), modern fashion (The Image Factory, 2003) and travel. Upon returning to Japan in 1954, after taking a degree in English from Columbia University, he supported himself by teaching at Waseda University, in Tokyo, and writing film and literary criticism for the Japan Times, which he continued to do until suffering from a stroke in 2009. Over the decades he mingled with the novelist Yukio Mishima, the actor Toshiro Mifune, the composer Toru Takemitsu, and the Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz Suzuki.
Ted Riederer
a “one-time refugee from punk and sometime band member,” has armed himself with painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, old LPs, record players, drum kits, hard disk recorders, photography equipment, a vinyl record lathe, and long-stemmed roses as he’s ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes. His “Never Records” project has traveled from New York, to Liverpool, to Derry, to New Orleans, to Texas, and to London, which was sponsored by the Tate Modern. Ted Riederer was the Founding Artistic Director of Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project, non-profit gallery/performance space in the East Village. The New York Times has described Howl! Happening as, “Instrumental to the history of the area.” Howl! Happening’s thriving publishing imprint A/P/E has included essays by: Ai Wei Wei, Dan Cameron, and James Wolcott.
Andrea Rolfes
makes stuff, taps away at her computer keys, plays with paint and other things. Gazes out of the window and dreams and is part of the herri team.
Matty Roodt
(b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist trying to master visual and experiential storytelling in various applications ranging from curating to creating films. They have organised and curated many independent group exhibitions and have been practising as a contemporary artist for over 10 years. The focus of their practice has shifted toward filmmaking and its peripheral guises. Matty sees their works as instances of poems, anecdotes and jokes. Transcendental, imaginative and sometimes laced with a peculiar sense of humour.
Dr Sophia Olivia Sanan
(PhD Sociology) is a lecturer at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest, Stellenbosch University. She teaches on Trauma Testimony with a focus on visuality, epistemology and ethics. She has published in academic and popular formats on African cultural policy, alternative museologies, race, historical injustice, and visual culture. Sophia co-leads a research collective of heritage practitioners, activists and scholars from Africa, South Asia, and Europe, who explore ideas and practices of counter-archiving and the post-museum in urban contexts, co-creating experimental publications, travelling schools and public dialogues.
Michael Schofield
is a lecturer and photographic artist working at the University of Leeds, UK. He publishes and exhibits work under the alias Michael C Coldwell, winning awards and critical acclaim for his creative practice in various media, such as the landscape film ‘Views from Sunk Island’ (2022) and his recent experiments with AI filmmaking in ‘The Jettison’ (2024). Back in 2018, Schofield received a doctorate for his practice-led research into spectrality and media, entitled ‘Aura and Trace: The Hauntology of the Rephotographic Image’, examined by Dr Kate Nash and Dr Sarah Atkinson (King’s College London), subsequently publishing several academic articles on the hauntology of various media forms. Over the last few years Schofield has become increasingly interested in the haunted and eerie qualities of AI image generation.
Stephen Scrivener
studied Fine Art at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) from 1969 to 1972. Entering art school as a painter, he became increasingly dissatisfied with subjectively determined art making and inspired by the experimental artists working in the college, such as Jack Rodway and Gavin Bryars, he produced experimental works exploiting the natural properties of light and water. In 1972 he joined the Experimental Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, directed by the Systems Artist, Malcolm Hughes, where he soon made the shift to using computational systems to make artworks. During this period he modelled and visualised a variety of homeostatic systems. This included the design of a stand alone electronic device, called The Machine, that viewers could disrupt by interacting with a control panel. After undertaking a PhD in Computer Science, he taught and conducted research into interactive computer systems design before returning to the art school in the late 1990s, culminating in his appointment as Head of Research at Chelsea College of Art. Since returning to the art school he has written widely on the theory and practice of artistic research. Today he works in a wide variety of media, including installation and he is currently Emeritus Professor at Chelsea and Visiting Professor at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication.
Dimakatso Sedite
was born in Bloemfontein in 1969, South Africa. She trained as a research psychologist and has worked in the areas of child rights, livelihoods and HIV/Aids. She is a poet, writer and blogger. Her poems have been published in New Coin, The Kalahari Review, Aerodrome, Botsotso, Hello Poetry, Poetry Café, Poetry Potion, as well as on her Writer’s Blog: nala4za. Her other poems appear in two anthologies: Best New African Poets 2018 Anthology and Botsotso 18: From Private and Public Places’ (Botsotso Publishers). In 2018 she won 1st Prize at the Poetry Open Mic Competition at the 2018 Jozi Book Fair, in tribute to South Africa’s late poet laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile. She is the recipient of the 2019 ANFASA non-fiction author award. She studied a poetry course at South African Writers’ College and holds an M.A. Research Psychology degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. She was a joint winner of the 2019 Dalro poetry prize. Yellow Shade is her first collection of poems.
Jurie Senekal
is a photographer, videographer, and editor whose work moves fluidly between documentary observation and quiet formal study. He holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, Michaelis.
Andrea Sick
is Professor of Media, and Cultural History and Theory at the University if the Arts in Bremen, Germany. Andrea studied German language and literature, politics, cultural sciences, and history of art in Heidelberg, Bremen, and Hamburg. She obtained a doctoral degree with a dissertation on the interactions between knowledge production and cartography. Andrea is the artistic coordinator and curator (together with Dr. Claudia Reiche since 1993) of the cultural project thealit. (thealit.de) Thealit designs programs that create conditions conducive to interactions between artistic and theoretical reflection. This enables a critical exploration and experimental transformation of the respective practices. The question of difference—particularly gender difference—forms the starting point of this work, and articulations of queerness are a central concern. One of Andrea’s research projects is The Dynamic Archive since 2018. Together with Ralf Baecker and Dennis Paul she curates the Salon Digital at University of the Arts Bremen (salon-digital). Andrea heads the Binational Artistic PhD Program and is Cospeaker together with Dennis Paul of the Digital Media Program at the University of the Arts Bremen.
Eugene Skeef
was recently appointed Professor of Practice at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg. Skeef is a South African percussionist, composer, poet, educationalist and workshop leader and has lived in London since 1980. He also works in conflict resolution, acts as a consultant on cultural development, teaches creative leadership and is a broadcaster. As a young activist he worked alongside the anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko and co-led a nation-wide literacy campaign teaching in schools, colleges and communities across South Africa. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has served on the board of directors of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). In September 2004 he was appointed musician in residence of the Purcell School of Music. In March 2005 Eugene performed with his Abantu Ensemble at Buckingham Palace and was presented to the Queen as part of the historic Music Day to celebrate the diversity of culture in Britain.
Neill Solomon
is one of the finest singer songwriters in South Africa, fronting Neill Solomon and the Uptown Rhythm Dogs through to Neill Solomon and the Passenger years, followed by his solo career. A multiple award-winning film, theatre, television soundtrack composer, songwriter and musician, Neill remains a visionary in the creative realms. Neill has scored the music for many internationally recognized film and theatre productions such as Jock of the Bushveld, Gavin Hood’s A Reasonable Man and the award-winning production Nothing but the Truth by John Kani. Neill, along with Stuart Wood (ex- Bay City Rollers) composed and recorded the music for numerous NAPAC productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stoppard’s Rosencrants & Guildenstern as well as Richard III. Playing in the band on the Rodriguez Tour in London in 2006 and supporting Joe Cocker in 2009, Neill forged ahead composing the song Crocodile Smile with long-time friend and band member Dan Chiorboli for Durban City for the 2010 World Cup, combining all musical cultures of the city, featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Neill scored the music for six years for the daily South African soapie Isidingo, The TV series Woestynblom saw Neill composing hauntingly beautiful music resonating the sounds of his humble Lebanese roots and being awarded a SAMA Award for his memorable contributions. Neill’s project The Liberation Project features Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music), Juan De Marcos (Buena Vista Social Club) and Sipho Hotstix Mabuse.
Professor Dhiru V Soni
is the Director for Research at REGENT Business School. Previously, he was the Head of Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.
Cara Stacey
is lecturer in Creative Music Technologies, Music Department, University of the Witwatersrand, and curator of the Hanns Adler Historical Instrument Collection. Stacey is pianist, musical bow player, composer and musicologist based in Johannesburg. Her research interests span Swati traditional music, southern African musical bow praxis, and discourse around innovation and heritage within local indigenous and other musical traditions. Her artistic work draws together musical bow structures, mbira and flute traditions from across southern Africa, free improvisation and collaborative composition.
Warrick Swinney
is a recording artist and sound theorist who works under the pseudonym Kalahari Surfers. He was a formative part of the Shifty recording studio and was involved in the political arts scene in Johannesburg during the 1980’s. After working in music composition, production and sound design at Milestone Studios for eighteen years, he moved into academia, completing an MFA from the University of Cape Town (2018) and securing a Mellon Fellowship as a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape, where he was awarded his PhD in 2024. He exhibited two video works at the 64th Venice Biennale and, during the Autumn of 2022, spent 3 months at the Radio Art Residency in Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, where he exhibited 15 video/sonic art works under the title Mutant Farmyard Activities. (Eigenheim Gallery). He has taught sound and glitch-art-based courses at the Michaelis School of Art and, in 2025, completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship as Artist in the lab in the Wits School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP). He is currently a Research Associate in the Wits School of the Arts.
Simon Taylor
graduated at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, with a PhD in artistic research directing the multilingual group Minus Theatre. His explorations and experiments since then continue to be in the nexus between practice and research, most recently in the field of moving image. A curated selection of his writing, including creative theory, political interventions, travel writing, poetry and scripts, is available at outsidelight.online. When not working to prove the attributes of perception are infinite, he lives, and works as librarian at the local library, on Waiheke Island.
Muriel Tinel-Temple
is Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton. She is currently course leader for the BA Film and BA Film Production. Her research explores first-person filmmaking, experimental filmmaking, found footage/archive-based films, essay film, and mediated landscapes. She is the author of Le Cinéaste au travail: autoportraits (2016), coeditor of From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (2019), and author of “Found Footage and the Construction of the Self” (Ekphrasis, 26/6, 2021).
Tsholofelo Tselaemang
is a creative researcher and film director. She was raised in Kuruman, a small desert town in the Northern Cape province in South Africa. Her upbringing has informed her specific interest in the authenticity of the “documentary moment” and how it applies across the whole spectrum of audiovisual storytelling. She has directed narrative short films and branded content in this regard. Her debut short film titled Hello Obakeng, was shortlisted for a YDA, 1.4 Award as well as a Ciclope Africa award. She currently works as a creative researcher and director on a number of short and long-form commercial and documentary projects.
Tuana
was born in Turkey, where she continues to live and write. She sees literature as a way of expressing what words alone often fail to capture. Drawn to the human mind, memory, dreams, and the changing nature of the self, her work frequently explores transience, incompleteness, and the search for meaning.
Lize-Marié Hansen van der Watt
is an historian whose work moves between the Arctic and Antarctica, examining how science, environment, geopolitics and cultural heritage shape understandings of the polar regions. She is based at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where she heads the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment. Holding a PhD in History from Stellenbosch University, she has previously worked at Umeå University and the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat. In addition to her research, she teaches Gender and Technology studies and contributes to international research and policy initiatives concerning the polar regions. Hansen van der Watt was PI of the Decay without Mourning: Future Thinking Heritage project.
Dick Verdult
(1954, Eindhoven, The Netherlands) work encompasses film, performance, graphics, drawing, sculptures and ceramics, radioshows, text and music. His multifaceted work is built on relinquishing control, allowing imperfections, and making an unprepared start. Verdult connects concepts from various disciplines and cultures, instantly changing the meanings and functions of objects and even actions. For all their diversity and elusiveness, his activities are always recognisable owing to a combination of no-tech and high-tech elements. The moment he presents them on an art stage, they turn out to be carefully considered and composed. Verdult has been a pioneer in the fields of interactive fiction, television, performance, radio, and the internet. He founded several art groups, including the IBW (Instituut voor Betaalbare Waanzin / Institute for Affordable Lunacy) and Festicumex – a festival for a non-existent music genre. As a visual artist and musician under the name Dick El Demasiado (Dick the Excessive) in the experimental Cumbia Lunaticas and Experimentales music he has acquired a cult status, especially in South America, Russia and Japan.
Dimitri Voudouris
born 1961 in Athens, Greece, a citizen of South Africa is senior clinical pharmacist, composer, scientific researcher who curated UNYAZI the first electro-acoustic music festival and symposium in Africa in 2005. He composes for acoustic instruments, electronics, multimedia, dance and theatre. His technical and theoretical approach researches cognitive psychoacoustic behavioural patterns in humans in an area of continued environmental changes, converts macro-environmental topographic sound diagrams, climatic and elevation data into esoteric sound modules and explores neural circuits which are highly organized, interconnected populations of neurons that process specific types of information and drive behaviour. Biomechanical principles assist him in the construction of various building blocks that in turn form the backbone of his compositions. Voudouris received a Palmares des 34e Concours Internationaux de Musique d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges award in 2007. Performeces at ICMC 2005/2006/2008/2009/2014, ACMA 2007, CCRMA 2008, UNYAZI 2005/2012/2014/2016, HELMCA 2009/ 2011/2015/2018, PGM (Bremen) 2012, Brighton Festival 2010, Neue Musik Lüneburg 2013, XV Biennale Sztuki Poznan 2005, Meridian International Festival 2016/2017/2018 Romania, Fenway Centre University Boston.
Tsepo Wa Mamatu
is an academic, drama lecturer, playwright, actor and director and visual artist. He studied drama at the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining a BA (Dramatic Art) in 2003, and a MA in African Literature and Film in 2007. He was a lecturer in the University of the Witwatersrand Drama Department for many years, later becoming a senior lecturer, and at one time deputy head.
Eve Wong
Eve Wong is an interdisciplinary social anthropologist and historian. Her dissertation “Fabulous Khoisan” (UCT), examines how urban Khoisan-identifying communities navigate identity, belonging, and marginalisation through the practices of sincerity, stickiness, and fabulation. Her broader research spans marginalisation, postcolonial identity, and visual anthropology.
Nelisiwe Xaba
lives and works as a dancer and choreographer in Johannesburg. Xaba began her vibrant career in dance almost thirty years ago. She received a scholarship to study at the Johannesburg Dance Foundation, as well as the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London. Before launching her solo career, Xaba worked with Pact Dance Company and Free Flight Dance Company. Since then, Xaba has been involved in various multi-media projects, collaborating with choreographers, fashion designers, poets and other different forms of artists. Her solo works and collaborations, including Plasticization, They Look At Me and That’s All They Think, Sakhozi Says “Non” to the Venus, Correspondances, (a collaboration with Kettly Noel) Black!…White?, Uncles & Angels and Fremde Tanz have toured extensively in South Africa and internationally. She was awarded the FNB Art Prize for the Uncles & Angels film created with Mocke J van Veuren in 2013. In 2016, she created Urban Mermaid for the 50th anniversary of the Goodman Gallery and performed the piece at the Berliner Festspiele. In 2017, Xaba created Bang Bang Wo, a solo performance that interrogates the politics of ‘help.’ In collaboration with Mocke J van Veuren, Xaba initiated Fake News, a dance project that employs live video projection to engage young students of movement, film and multimedia from academic and non-academic institutions. Xaba is the recipient of the prestigious Villa Albertine residency in New York.
Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana
was born on the 22nd of May 1972 at Grey Hospital in King William’s town. He is qualified with a BSocSc (HONS) in sociology from the University of Cape Town and also a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing from the same university. He is presently registered for a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree at Rhodes University. He is presently working as a research curator for Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. He is a multi-award winning South African poet, essayist and novelist. During 2024 he won the most prestigious South African Literary Award in the poetry category. The same book, Dark Lines Of History, also won him an accolade in the inaugural Eastern Cape Literary Awards. During 2023, his poem, “Ostrich Egg Carrier Of The Kalahari” won him first place in one of the national AVBOB competitions. His debut novel, The Faint-Hearted Man was published by Buchu Books in 1991 and was longlisted for the Noma Award for publishing in Africa. He has most recently published six books through Mwanaka Media and Publishing: Dark Lines of History that won him South African Literary Award for poetry, Iziyaca, Ntombentle: Selected Poems and The Kaleidoscope Of Life: Essays On Identity And Indigenous Knowledge Systems, IMAGINED (an epic poem) and a novel The Troubled Child.
Adli Yacubi
is a Cape Town-born writer, designer, and activist working at the intersection of spiritual memory, social justice, and visual poetics. Shaped by South Africa’s resistance culture and the Cape Muslim tradition, his work weaves ancestral storytelling with present-day protest. His scrolls and writings speak to the wounded, the remembered, and the silenced – in Gaza, in the Cape, and beyond.
Nida Younis
poet, journalist and translator from Ramallah, is one of the most impressive literary voices of her generation. Love, loss, resistance, occupation and social constraints are themes in her poetry.
Akiva Zamcheck
Assistant Professor of Music, Music Department, Lafayette College. Akiva is a musician from New York. His research focuses on contemporary music and urban political struggles, and his creative work combines history, news/media analysis, and audio experiments. He has organised performances and exhibitions revitalising engagement with multimedia composers (“Against Art Music”, Brooklyn College 2024), and “Arrows and Operators”, University of New England/ Open Systems Gallery, upcoming July-October 2026). Akiva teaches music history and electronic music at Lafayette College and performs frequently with Adam Mirza in their live electronic duo Fake Radiolab.
Michael Zeller
is an experimental elementary particle physicist concentrating on weak interactions employing K mesons. His experimental work has been mostly at Brookhaven’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, although he has also performed experiments at SLAC, Fermilab, and CERN. He has been Chairman of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, was a member of the C-11 commission representing the U.S. to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He has served on many national planning and advisory committees, including HEPAP and several laboratory advisory committees. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. As a professor and educator he has received both teaching prizes awarded to Yale faculty. He frequently has been invited to give popular lectures to high school and elementary teachers in the New Haven area. He recently retired from the Yale faculty and spends his time reading, studying, and doing those things he has meant to do for many years.
Mthuthuzeli ‘Blaze’ Zimba
is an Actor, writer, director, academic researcher, art teacher and an interdisciplinary artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Zimba believes in creating performances of transgression and disruption as a way of creating dialogue to confront and address unresolved socio-political issues that plague contemporary South Africa. Holding a Master’s Degree in Theatre and Performance from the University of Cape Town, his powerful, socially urgent work also include works that critically interrogate Black masculinity, Marginalization, Space and surveillance. Having trained as a theatre maker, Zimba has written, directed, and produced several theatre plays and also curated thought-provoking live art projects, showing at various internationally acclaimed performance festivals in Cape Town, South Africa. Zimba’s work attempt to reimagine Black marginalised people out of the bondages of destitution. When Black Men Disappear (2026): A play he wrote and directed for the Zabalaza Festival that explores Afrofuturism, black boy consciousness, and masculinity in a post-apocalyptic South Africa.
Niklas Carl Zimmer
is a cultural heritage digitisation specialist based in Cape Town. As Digital Scholarship and Data Curation Manager at FCTEC, he collaborates with libraries, archives, museums and universities across sub-Saharan Africa to develop sustainable approaches to digitisation, digital preservation and AI-assisted access to knowledge. His work explores the meeting point of technology, memory, education and the humanities, informed by earlier careers in fine art, teaching, music and photography.
Alenka Zupančič
(b.1966) is a Lacanian philosopher and social theorist. She is a professor at The European Graduate School / EGS and at the University of Nova Gorica. As well, Zupančič is a research advisor and professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Together with Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Zupančič is one of the most prominent members of the “Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis.” She is also a renowned Nietzsche scholar. Important themes in Zupančič’s work include: relations between sexuality, ontology and the unconscious; critique of the theory of subject; and the theoretical exploration of the Lacanian concept of the Real. Her most recent work concerns the relationship between sexuality and ontology. According to Zupančič, Freud claims that sexuality is fundamentally problematic because it is impossible to describe it or to delineate it in precise and fixed terms. Therefore, the main characteristic of sexuality is its impossibility of being bounded or demarcated. As such, sexuality is important because it points outward toward a non-reducible ontological inconsistency.