Gender & Geography
You Will Find Your People Here
Caroline Wanjiku Kihato (Nairobi, Kenya, 1971)
lives and works in Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa and Oxford, UK
Clare Loveday (Johannesburg, Repubblica del Sudafrica, 1967)
lives and works in Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa
Mareli Stolp (Pretoria, Repubblica del Sudafrica, 1980)
lives and works in Pretoria, Republic of South Africa
Sedinam Awo Tsegah (Accra, Ghana, 1992)
lives and works in Accra, Ghana
Nestled between performance, film, composition, and exhibition, You Will Find Your People Here is a collaborative, interdisciplinary work by pianist Mareli Stolp, sociologist Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, and composer Clare Loveday. The 30-minute film presents Loveday and Stolp’s creative response to migrant women’s testimonies collected in Kihato’s book, Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In- Between City. Written for a vocalising pianist, the work combines piano, spoken word, and vocal utterances to produce an immersive sound-world that interprets the words of migrant women who travelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Malawi to Johannesburg.
The diagrams by Sedinam Awo Tsegah adorning the walls unsettle how we understand urbanity, social worlds, and family. They tell stories of a heterotopic city that is rooted here and there and holds the contradictions of migration; at once offering hope and aspiration, deferred dreams and broken promises. Migrant women’s journeys allow us to reimagine the city.
Authorial collaborators
Heather Mason, Loren B. Landau, Thomas Asher, Juan S. Moreno
Technical collaborators
Kabiri Bule (African Centre for Migration in Society, University of the Witwatersrand), Dare Brawley (Centre for Spatial Research, University of Columbia), Reuben Fleisch (Department of Architecture, University of Cape Town), Laura Kurgan (Centre for Spatial Research, University of Columbia), Nassim Majidi (Samuel Hall), Mary B. Setrana (Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana), Ryan Barret (So Print London), Katja Holtz, (Frame45), Tanya Pampalone (Frame45), Zain Vally (Centre for the Less Good Idea)
With special thanks to
Fazila and Florence from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hannah from Malawi, Jeanette from Rwanda, Sibongile from Zimbabwe
With the additional support of
Mellon Foundation ‘Mobility, temporality, and Africa’s future politics’ project at the University of the Witwatersrand; The African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand; The Migration Governance Lab, University of the Witwatersrand and Oxford University; The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg; African Futures Institute. Music commissioned by the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) Foundation
