Art / Memory workshops

SAHA has developed an art-making workshop process to capture visual and oral histories of individuals and communities, particularly around political and human rights struggles and abuses in South Africa.

In 2007 and 2008, SAHA, in conjunction with the Khulumani Support Group, conducted a series of pilot workshops with communities in the East Rand and the Vaal Triangle. These were aimed at exploring people's memories, their personal histories, and their understandings of violence and loss during the decades of repression, resistance and the struggle for national liberation.

Images from Art / Memory Workshop in Sedibeng 2008

These workshops employed existing archives in the form of news clippings, posters and photographs that related to the community involved in order to create a new archive. The images, artwork, recorded stories, and historical understandings that emerged from these workshops are intended as memorial and heritage presentations to, for, and about the specific communities and organization which make them. SAHA is committed to ensuring the stories from these workshops are preserved and disseminated as part of our historical record. The publication Katorus Stories is just one example of how this can be done.

SAHA continues to develop this methodology as a way of unearthing stories and voices currently under-represented in archives in South Africa.

If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact Catherine Kennedy.