URBANIST SCUPLTOR FILM PHOTOGRAPHER

                            

Lesego Bantsheng is interested in cosmologies and technologies from rural geographies. Through research, machine learning, clay, and mycelium she explores speculations regarding both the past and future of rural and peri-urban spatiality. She thinks of the archive as a series of prompts that can be re-evaluated through critical fabulations.

HISTORIAN PIANIST STORYTELLER

Siyabonga Njica is a literary and cultural historian based at the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge University. His work draws on the histories of black transnationalism in the twentieth century, African and diasporic intellectual traditions, the black literary archive, history and performance cultures, and cultural history. Siyabonga has been engaged in critical, interdisciplinary, and Africa-focused research for almost ten years, and has extensive experience in leading grassroots arts education programs which are committed to building inclusive spaces that are focused on developing an understanding of inequality and injustice.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT RESEARCHER PHOTOGRAPHER

Karabo Moumakwe is a young architect  from Mahikeng, South Africa. He is a Masters (MArch) graduate (2020) from the Graduate School of Architecture (University of Johannesburg) and completed his Bachelors of Science in Architecture at the University of Pretoria in 2015.

His academic interests explored literary and filmic devices that are used to render the domestic setting and/or urban spaces, through time and geography, ‘unheimlich’ or unhomely, by using Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, Homi Bhabha’s theory of ‘unhomely’ and Anthony Vidler’s definition of the phenomena. Karabo also enjoys exploring themes of curatorship and exhibits, of museums as a tool of material culture and value making, of counternarratives, of innovative forms of archiving, and of unearthing and layering stories of/about artefacts, buildings and spaces.

Apart from academia and architecture, his obsessions include typography and graphic design, photography, film, writing,

music, reading and listening to insightful and critical conversations. He enthusiastically enjoys comic books and comic book films.

Awande Buthelezi is an organizer and lead researcher at the Co-operative and Policy Alternative Center (COPAC). He is also the lead coordinator for the Climate Justice Deal research, to create a comprehensive macroeconomic framework for South Africa built on climate justice principles to meet the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of the country within the shifting context of the crisis. He is also a speaker and climate justice educator, who facilitates workshops and lectures on climate justice for community activists, students and trade unionists. Buthelezi’s research interests are in alternative economic systems, economic history, development, political economy, political ecology, and climate justice. Before joining COPAC, Buthelezi was an associate and researcher at the Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA) and an organiser for the Inaugural Re-thinking Economics for Africa Festival (at the University of the Witwatersand). Buthelezi has an MA in Development Studies form the University of the Witwatersrand. His master’s dissertation focus was on the Green New Deal and is entitled “The Green New Deal as Counter-Hegemony".