my road was in between…
my road was in between… is an exhibition that explores the tangled, often contradictory, and sometimes difficult feelings we carry about home. The works on display emerged from a series of workshops held in 2024–2025 at the BMW Centre for Art Education (BMW CFAE). Grade 11s and 12 from Cedar High School in Mitchell’s Plain were invited to the museum to create counter-cartographies; maps that trace not just physical space, but relationship: to home, to memory, to daily movement, to dreams, and to the precarious conditions that shape their lives in Mitchell’s Plain.
Mitchell’s Plain was constructed in the 1970s as a “model township” 30 kilometres outside of Cape Town centre. Under the Group Areas Act of 1950, Coloured families were forcibly removed from areas like District Six and resettled there; severed from the networks, resources, and communities they had built, and placed at a calculated remove from the city. This was both as a piece of apartheid propaganda and a deliberate attempt to isolate a portion of Cape Town’s Coloured community from the liberation movement and from political and social mobility. Today, the area contends with gang violence, crime, and infrastructure under immense strain, a legacy inseparable from its origins.
Drawing on the work of artist Julie Mehretu and her engagement with psychogeography — the study of how space shapes emotion, behaviour, and everyday movement. Participants were asked to mark environments not as fixed coordinates, but as experiential terrain: shaped by their feelings toward Mitchell’s Plain, and by their ongoing navigation of forced relocation and the spatial inequalities Apartheid left behind.
The exhibition speaks to the complexity of being a young person navigating life in the township today, a complexity that finds an unexpected echo in this setting. Housed here in the museum at the V&A Waterfront, an area with its own long history of inaccessibility and exclusion and positioned alongside a BMW vehicle. my road was in between… places two very different registers of movement side by side: the freedom of motion these young people are still negotiating for themselves, and the freedom of motion the city already affords elsewhere. The works in this exhibition situate the relationship with home within a larger web of unequal geographies, politics, and personal experiences, each shaping the other, none of them separable from the rest.
For more information, email education@zeitzmocca.museum.
Zeitz MOCAA’s educational programming is generously supported by BMW South Africa.
