The 2025 Zeitz MOCAA and UWC museum fellowship cohort present their second public intervention, Our People’s Library: Subterranean Sonics. This intervention follows the Poster Making workshop which explored posters as instruments of resistance. Inspired by the radical visual language of African liberation movements, this workshop primarily drew on materials from the Mayibuye Archives and Dumile Feni posters featured in the Zeitz MOCAA exhibition, Spring Is Rebellious: The Art & Life of Albie Sachs.
The second intervention, Subterranean Sonics, is a collaboration between the 2025 Zeitz MOCAA and UWC Fellows and Dr. Uhuru Phalafala. By activating the library present in the Spring Is Rebellious exhibition, we experiment with alternative approaches to archiving and amplifying “other” voices through sound. The Black sonic becomes a method to challenge traditional archives and written histories, opening space for multiple voices and ways of knowing. It subverts the hierarchy of literature as “privileged sources of legitimate knowledge” and that of the ocular as the primary mode of knowing history and the world.
You are warmly invited to join us for an evening of collective storytelling and listening, where assembled Southern African records weave the voices, stories, sounds, and objects to create a living and embodied ancestral chorus. With a focus on feeling and deep listening, Our People’s Library: Subterranean Sonics becomes a space for experimentation, expression, exaltation, and rest, enabled by legacies and lineages of Black art in Southern Africa.
Date & Time
Thursday, 4 December 2025 | 5.30 pm – 8 pm
Venue
Zeitz MOCAA Atrium Bowl, Level -1
Entry is free and registration starts at 5.30 pm. For more information, contact kea.mosienyane@zeitzmocaa.museum.
THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.
meet dr uhuru phalafala
Photo: Reza Kota
Uhuru Phalafala is a Cape Town-based writer, scholar, archivist, and dreamer. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Stellenbosch University, where she teaches black consciousness literary, visual, and sonic cultures across the Black Atlantic, and poetry as a modality for repair. She’s published the poetry book, Mine Mine Mine (2023), and a philosophical book titled Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement (2024). Her current book project is on black and indigenous ecological practices.