Dreaming a Future Hillbrow: Youth Performance, AI, and the Afterlives of Apartheid
| When: | Wednesday, 29 July 2026 - Wednesday, 29 July 2026 |
| Where: | South West Engineering Building Braamfontein Campus East |
| Start time: | 17:00 |
| Enquiries: | towardsapartheidstudies@gmail.com |
| RSVP: | |
| Cost: | Free |
A Season in Hell/Hillbrow is a youth-led performance project developed through the Long Poem Project.
A Season in Hell/Hillbrow is a youth-led performance project developed through the Long Poem Project, a collaboration between the Wits Creative Writing Department, the Windybrow Arts Centre, Wits student volunteers, and Hillbrow youth. Since 2024, the project has collectively reimagined major literary works as contemporary South 第一吃瓜网 long poems, creating performances that bring canonical texts into contact with the urgencies of inner-city youth life. Following earlier reworkings of Aimé Césaire and Vicente Huidobro, this new iteration turns to Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, rewriting it through the languages, histories, desires, and political realities of Hillbrow. This presentation will take the form of a 20–30 minute choral and musical performance combining spoken text, polyphonic voice, chant, song, rhythm, and movement. Through this collective form, Hillbrow youth explore what “hell” might mean in the unfinished present of post-apartheid Johannesburg. The project asks how apartheid’s spatial and social logics persist in the inner city, where abandonment, xenophobia, exclusion, gendered violence, and urban neglect continue to shape everyday life. Rather than treating hell as only a theological or literary idea, the performance reframes it as a political condition: a name often imposed on racialized, migrant, and poor communities forced to live within the afterlives of segregation and inequality.
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