Centre for Humanities Research

Opening session of the Encounters Festival @ 📍 Iyatsiba Lab , Centre for Humanities Research -UWC

What's on at Encounters ...

Schedule What’s on and when Plan your festival experience in either Cape Town or Johannesburg.

Please join us on Tuesday 9 June for the next Humanities in Session: Conversations, Thoughts, Experiments, with Jordache Ellapen who will be in conversation with Pralini Naidoo.

Synopsis:
In this public conversation, Jordache Ellapen engages his newly published book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Q***r Limits of South African Blackness. In Indenture Aesthetics, Jordache A. Ellapen examines the visual and performance art practices of feminist, q***r, femme, and gender-nonconforming Afro-Indian and South African black artists to understand the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary South Africa. Tracing the afterlife of apartheid-era racial categories and revisiting Bantu Stephen Biko’s Black Consciousness, Ellapen theorizes South African blackness through the Indian Ocean World, showing how the development of an Afro-Indian identity after generations of indentured labor and segregation troubles persistent racial hierarchies.

Date: Tuesday 9 June
Times: 13:00pm
Venue: Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
(enter via Regent St)

https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/humanities-in-session-indenture-aesthetics-in-south-africa-with-jordache-ellapen/

Encounters Documentary Film Festival: Encounters Talks

We are delighted to once again collaborate with Encounters Documentary Film Festival, and will be hosting a series of Encounters Talks at Iyatsiba Lab on 5 and 6 June.

https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/encounters-documentary-film-festival-encounters-talks/

Saturday 6 June

📍 Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape (UWC), Woodstock, Cape Town

My Tongue Bound Stretches a Map of Sorrow: Reclaiming Culture as a Restorative Pathway

🕦 11:30 – 13:00 SAST
We reclaim culture as a restorative pathway to rectify social injustices. By reviving languages, rituals and stories that were suppressed and marginalised, we reconnect with the values, and relationships that shape us. We explore how resistance was wrought through storytelling in rhyme in Notes from the Underground (Dirs. Adrian Van Wyk and Chris Kets), how the body becomes a powerful communicator and repository of memory when speech is suppressed in WAT WAS HIE? (Dir. Luke De K**k) and how a spiritual calling and return to ritual allow for deep restoration in Eyes to see (Haneem Christians). This deliberate retrieval of cultural practices restores continuity across generations, offering a necessary sense of self-understanding and communal belonging.

Settling Spirits: The Role of the Storyteller and Museum in Repatriation and Spiritual Justice

🕜 13:45 – 15:15 SAST
The storyteller plays a vital role in cultural repatriation, translating loss, memory and meaning between affected communities and institutions. As an interpreter of oral histories ceremonial practice, they contextualise cultural objects and human remains not as inert museum or scientific artefacts, but as active carriers of ancestry, identity and spiritual lore. In Elephants & Squirrels (Dir. Gregor Brändli), the storyteller frames why return matters beyond ownership, following Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige as she retraces the colonial-era journey of two Swiss men who collected specimens and artefacts, including human remains, from the region taking them back to Europe for ‘scientific research.’ In light of global repatriation battles, we ask what role museums play in their willingness to cede control where ethically required, and explore how museums in the Majority World have led this charge.

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Encounters in collaboration with The NRF UK/SA Bilateral Chair in Culture & Technics will be hosting the following events :

Friday 5 June

📍 Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape (UWC), Woodstock, Cape Town

Women as Workers and Warriors

🕚 11:00 – 12:30 SAST

African women on the forefront is not a new advent, but these positions of power have purposefully been buried, and are now slowly excavated by our storytellers. We journey with women truck drivers redefining the road in Truck Mama (Dir. Zippy Nyaru), and single mothers on the frontlines of public health in Mama-Demic (Dir. Nicole Schafer), we stand alongside poets repatriating spiritual heritage in Bones (Dir. Nomandla Vilikazi) and urgently reflect on bodies and power in Marxism & Period Pains (Dir. Mmabatho Montsho). At the same time, we remember how women throughout history have always been warriors and workers, holding positions of power and contributing significantly to their communities and nations since the dawn of time.

Filmmaking as Reparative Practice

🕜 13:30 – 15:00 SAST
Filmmaking is a powerful process of psychosocial repair. To delve into fragmented memories, confusing chronologies and unknown histories, and slowly piece it together allows us to shape a whole story and imbue it with new meaning. The lens can provide a seemingly objective witness, often helping difficult conversations unfold. In the edit, we watch and rewatch, gaining agency over our story. From confronting state violence and reckoning with personal grief in My Father and Qaddafi (Dir. Jihan), to truth-telling and emotional legacy under apartheid in My Father’s Son (Dir. Elan Gamaker), we explore how storytelling through documentary filmmaking becomes a kind of suture, drawing the edges together with care so that something whole can finally emerge.

Dear Encounters followers and supporters,

📍 Encounters runs from 4–14 June 2026 across Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria.

We’re delighted to welcome back audiences and participants who joined us last year and the year before for the Encounters Talks programme. Your presence and engagement have helped shape these conversations into something meaningful and alive, and we would love to have you join us again this year as we continue to explore documentary film, storytelling, memory and creative practice together.

The 2026 Encounters Talks series is a free (donation-based) series masterclasses, and conversations taking place across venues in Cape Town from 5–12 June. We invite you to RSVP as soon as possible to secure your place.

If you're interested, you can find more details here (pdf) or on our website here. Here is a small snippet of what to expect.

REMINDER !!!

The CHR, in collaboration with the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Iziko Museums of South Africa, will be hosting in Slavery’s Wake: making Black Freedom in the World, on 27 May 2026.

Date: Wednesday 27 May 2026
Venue: Iyatsiba Lab, 66 Greatmore St, Woodstock, Cape Town
Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm (with an evening reception)
Registration: https://luma.com/axm54jp6
The history and legacies of slavery and the concept and meanings of freedom, with their attendant questions of the forms and understandings of labour, identity, and race, and the trickery of control societies, have been central questions in the ongoing work of the Centre for Humanities Research. The work of the Global Curatorial Project, through its Unfinished Conversations series and its traveling exhibition, In Slavery’s Wake, has been staging this question in novel ways. In this workshop, we take our cue from In Slavery’s Wake in order to examine the legacies of slavery and control in the Cape, with a particular emphasis on the freedoms shaped and invented while in the hold of these systems, while creating space for freedom, for “what is most human in [humankind]” (Fanon, BSWM). Through a series of presentations and conversations, the workshop will explore questions of identity, labour, control, and the enduring legacy of slavery in the Cape, as well as the ongoing work of undoing its scripts.

📍 Encounters runs from 4–14 June 2026 across Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria.

We’re delighted to welcome back audiences and participants who joined us last year and the year before for the Encounters Talks programme. Your presence and engagement have helped shape these conversations into something meaningful and alive, and we would love to have you join us again this year as we continue to explore documentary film, storytelling, memory and creative practice together.

The 2026 Encounters Talks series is a free (donation-based) series masterclasses, and conversations taking place across venues in Cape Town from 5–12 June. We invite you to RSVP as soon as possible to secure your place.

If you're interested, you can find more details here (pdf) or on our link to the website here
https://encounters.co.za/industry-event/
Here is a small snippet of what to expect.

The CHR, in collaboration with the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Iziko Museums of South Africa, will be hosting in Slavery’s Wake: making Black Freedom in the World, on 27 May 2026.

Date: Wednesday 27 May 2026
Venue: Iyatsiba Lab, 66 Greatmore St, Woodstock, Cape Town
Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm (with an evening reception)
Registration: https://luma.com/axm54jp6
The history and legacies of slavery and the concept and meanings of freedom, with their attendant questions of the forms and understandings of labour, identity, and race, and the trickery of control societies, have been central questions in the ongoing work of the Centre for Humanities Research. The work of the Global Curatorial Project, through its Unfinished Conversations series and its traveling exhibition, In Slavery’s Wake, has been staging this question in novel ways. In this workshop, we take our cue from In Slavery’s Wake in order to examine the legacies of slavery and control in the Cape, with a particular emphasis on the freedoms shaped and invented while in the hold of these systems, while creating space for freedom, for “what is most human in [humankind]” (Fanon, BSWM). Through a series of presentations and conversations, the workshop will explore questions of identity, labour, control, and the enduring legacy of slavery in the Cape, as well as the ongoing work of undoing its scripts.