Creative Week Cape Town

Participatory Film and Photography Project

This exhibition represents the culmination of the practical aspect of an Honours project, conducted by UCT Video Production Graduate Sydelle Willow Smith, through the Social Anthropology Department at UCT. Sydelle spent four weeks working with four young people who live in Blikkiesdorp, teaching them basic photographic skills  and basic storytelling skills on disposable cameras. Each participant then chose someone from their community to interview for the film, and led Sydelle around filming what they chose of their given environment, they also worked with her on the editing process of the film.

The projects aims are to allow members of the Blikkiesdorp “community” to represent themselves inspiring confidence in their own abilities to produce bodies of work about their lives – while being represented by an outsider.  The written thesis aspect of the process will engage with notions of home and belonging in a temporary space as well as issues of citizenship and ownership in the context of South Africa’s current housing crisis. Proceeds from the sale of exhibition prints will go partially towards each participant, remaining funds will be used to reproduce the exhibition. A version of the exhibition and film screening will be held in Blikkiesdorp later this year when the weather improves. An underlying objective of combining visual methods with other forms of ethnographic enquiry was to engage with ideas of what visuals can represent and depict that words perhaps cannot, allowing for a degree of democratization to take place between “subject” and “object”.

The views presented by City officials in the film are their own personal perspectives and do not reflect the views of the City itself.

The printing was generously donated by Color Services Santa Barbara California.

Additional funds were provided by the Percy Fox Institute through the Centre for Film and Media Department at UCT.

The Honours degree is funded by an AW Mellon Scholarship as well as National Research Foundation Funding.

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