An intimate listening session with a community of makers exploring Xhosa fashion histories & sensibilities in Mrs James home.

Our GFA24 hosting programme was a practice in deep listening and knowledge sharing. We hosted a screening and the release of the new seasons stories. This intimate engagement was not just about reading the material culture found in kwaXhosa, but was also about recognising the archive as embodied and continually changing/shifting, as something living while locating the unspoken languages/sounds of the community.

Following on from introductions made with Mr Mangaliso Jafta from Lurhwayizo in Willowvale in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, a local social entrepreneur, community leader and former Umkhonto we Sizwe Operative, the UN/FOLDING_ RE/FOLDING_FOLDED: Imiphindo kwaXhosa podcast returns to the village. We piece through the healing and honouring of a politically charged story that continues to echo in the lives and aesthetics of it’s community.

A story surrounding the battle of 1987 in Lurhwayizo, becomes a gateway for us to come to learn of the ways a village has offered political survivors modes of healing. While in Lurhwayizo/Willowvale, we continue to explore imigobo/imiphindo (fashion(ing) histories) of the Xhosa people who live in this particular place; what are the scattered archives of this place (material and/or immaterial)? How has the upholding of Xhosa sensibilities (the dress histories, rituals, heritage identities) played a pivotal role in a place becoming a living archive of both political and cultural (hi)stories?

Watch the full recording on the GFA Youtube Channel.

About the podcast
UN/FOLDING_ RE/FOLDING_FOLDED: Imiphindo kwaXhosa is a curious polyvocal sonic intervention that explores dress sensibilities kwaXhosa, the podcast considered how do Xhosa fashions come to inform/encourage/affirm one’s place in community, their roles and responsibilities to others as they work/share/live as a part of a collective. The podcast is produced by Siviwe James in close collaboration with Sihle Sogaula and Bongani Tau, and nested in The Fold: a creative research project led by the African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) in partnership with Creative Nestlings Foundation for the New Narratives Programme in Africa (2023) and supported by the British Council #SSAArts.

About AFRI
The African Fashion Research Institute was founded in 2019, largely shaped by what we consider to be the urgent and overdue need to remember, rethink, and rewrite fashion histories that speak to afro-centric ways of wearing, knowing, making, and styling often absent in fashion books, exhibitions, and imaginations. The African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) shares the work of local and global African fashion pioneers, academics, makers, thinkers, students, critics and leaders through fashion-driven decolonial research projects and digital platforms. We aim to create new networks of knowledge generation and exchange with online and shareable materials for outreach, curricula development and general public interest. Partnerships and collaborations are at the forefront of building our community, with African fashion studies leading the way to rethink and reframe fashion aesthetics and practices emerging on, and from the continent and its diaspora. Together, we showcase cultural and creative knowledges, archive unique, diverse, alternate identity narratives, and sustain new design narratives.

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