our people’s library: symposium
The 2025 Fellows concluded their time at Zeitz MOCAA with a public symposium titled Our People’s Library, a title and gesture that has guided their year-long engagement with the museum. Our People’s Library first emerged as a response to Albie Sachs’s physical library within the exhibition Spring Is Rebellious: The Art & Life of Albie Sachs but quickly unfolded into a more nuanced inquiry. Moving beyond the archive of objects and the printed word, the Fellows brought forth questions of authorship, dispersed knowledges, and shared responsibility, not only in their independent research but in museum work more broadly. In this way, Our People’s Library has operated less as a fixed concept than as a method: one that privileges conversation, refusal, and collective sense-making over singular positions or resolved outcomes.
Held on 22 January, the symposium brought these propositions into conversation. The Fellows presented their research papers, completed at the University of the Western Cape, through a series of presentations and two panel discussions. Together, these sessions examined how knowledge is staged, mediated, and activated within and beyond institutional structures. Here they unpacked relationships to time, objects, and people—probing how borders emerge as sites of impasse, friction, and possibility, and how “becoming” is a continuous act often propelled by marginal voices making space and authoring on their own terms. As a result, the histories the Fellows write feel personable and written to be read. They are biographies, psychographies and what might be thought of as “art chemistries.” Their approaches are responsive histories—honouring experiences and material worlds that resist coherence or containment.
Rather than offering conclusive presentations, the Fellows approached the symposium as an unfolding conversation, made up of fragments and familiarities, with the day being governed by the people present and an invitation to overlap, interrupt, and return. In this way, the event mirrored a broader research ethos they collectively formed, one that is attentive to relational forms rather than prescriptive norms.
Extending these conversations beyond the day itself, the Fellows also launched Gather: Our People’s Library, a conversational card game developed as part of their final offering. The deck comprises 48 prompts, designed to be played in varied contexts. Gather functions as a portable, enduring, tool, inviting players to redefine themes of solidarity, revolution, exile, through their own stories. Played in small groups, and in the round on the day, the game reinforces this Fellows’ commitment to knowledge as something multi-sensory and constantly made through our engagement with one another.
Across their year at Zeitz MOCAA, the 2025 Cohort has embodied a spirit of rebellion that is both critical and generative. Through their many interventions, public programmes, writing, this symposium, and a game, they have offered the institution moments of critique, play, and upon reflection, speculative formulas for a ‘people’s museum’ as a concept shaped by those who move through it. For 2025, that was not only the visitor but also Myles, Esinam, Deborah, Evyn, Arafa, and Kea.
Image: left to right: Deborah Olatunji (Nigeria/USA), Myles Tarentaal (South Africa), Keamogetse Mosienyane (Botswana), Arafa C. Hamadi (Tanzania/Kenya), Evyn Bileri Banawoye (Togo/USA), Esinam Damalie (Ghana). Photo: Ramiie G, courtesy of Zeitz MOCAA.