Youth from Windybrow recite piercing, haunting poetry and song at launch of Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming Cityscapes exhibition at Origins Centre
Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming Cityscapes, is an attempt to reimagine the future of African cities on at Wits Origin Centre 18 April – 3 July 2026.
By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor
When I arrived at The Origins Centre at Wits on Saturday, 18, April 2026, I was 15 minutes late. However, I found myself among fellow late comers filing in. Luckily, the official proceedings had not started. I looked around among the attendees. Their faces were serious. The kind of faces that people when they are expecting to view a serious exhibition opening. Some were milling around, moving from one place to another,floor to the next, viewing exhibitions, both temporary and permanent.
But because I had gone there for one mission, and that is view the exhibition titled Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming Cityscapes, which opened on the day and was attended by key players in academic, professional art practice and students, running from 18 April to 3 July 2026, I went straight into one of the exhibition hall housing this important exhibition.
An interdisciplinary investigation of cities as they exist in Africa and their positionality in the context of on-going global debates about the future of cities, such as their intersection with migration, climate change and geopolitical instability, this exhibition was contributed to by a number of key players.
Artists, curators, academic and writers in key African cities –Nairobi in Kenya, Johannesburg in South Africa and Accra, Ghana, involving 29 artists selected from each city, each commissioned work is an attempt to interpret the cityscapes in each city, mapping the city using art in relation to current debates about the future of the cities and planning around that in the context of shifting philosophical questions in relation to migration, climate change and attitudes and responses of those in power.
Looking at these art works, you will be propelled to think hard about the hot issues of environment, migration and the raging politics around those issues. The curators here, are trying to show that in as much as global experts, particularly in the Global North, are busy grappling about the question of the future of cityscapes in the face of climate change and migration, African cities have in fact, reached that point where the future is becoming clear already. In other words, African cities are the future. They are currently existing in that future.
In other words,Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming Cityscapes, is an attempt to reimagine the future of African cities. The collaborators in the creation of this powerful body of work, are in fact, attempting to reimagine how that future of African cities looks like, based on their current observations of the cities under investigation in this body of work.
Basing their conclusion on a number of factors, including the fact that in the last two decades of the century, African urban population grew by 469 million, and by 2050 the urban population will stand at 1.4 billion people, the future seems to be here in Africa. And according to this exhibition’s narrative, that future is in fact being lived right now in cities that draw people in, such as Johannesburg, Nairobi and Accra.
“African cities are not at the margins of global urban future. They are among the places where that future is being lived,” the curators state in a curatorial note accompanying this exhibition, which includes a book and a platform featuring essays by various writers picked from the three participating cities, as well as the art that includes painting, sculpture and a video installation.
The curators explained that putting together this exhibition was not a child’s play as they had to work across geographies, moving art that needed the collaboration of African bureaucracy, which sometimes can be cumbersome, pairing art works that are stylistically different, even with regards to materiality and conflicts in between cities regarding their characters.
The curatorial team for this exhibition comprises Naadira Patel, Karina Kanbi, Karoline Wanjiku Kihato and Loren B. Landau.
Fred Swart, Sophie Losue, Tanya Pambalanone and Kabiri Bule, are part of the project team, assisted by Shongile Myeza, Gemma Gatticchi and Gurbani Kaur.
However, it is the end of the formalities that really was an eye opener for guests when young performers from the inner city –Windybrow Centre of the Arts, drawn from mainly Hillbrow, took to stage in a spectacular display of artistry, demonstrating so much confidence by young people coming from a place regarded as socially broken.
These youngsters in as much as they sang proudly about their kasie –Hillbrow, they did not shy away from acknowledging problems that exist and define life in this community –homelessness, street violence, Gender based violence, filth, failing electricity supply, and generally the uncertainty of existence, and the ever constant struggle to try and overcome under those limiting condition.
However, it is among these young people where the future lies, according to their mentor Stacy Hardy of Wits Creative Writing Unit. Stacy has been for years been working with these young people at the centre, offering them creative writing workshops, and as a result, they are increasingly becoming a force to reckon with when it comes to authentic, unfiltered performances at events around Johannesburg and beyond..
“The future of Johannesburg is not in Rosebank or Sandton, but in the inner city Johanneburg. The future is not the old people, but these young people,” Stacy boldly declared.
Only a few if any among the audience must have disagreed. If they did their opinions were drained out by the standing ovation and the applause that accompanied the young people’s performance of piercing, haunting poetry inspired by Martinican poet Aimé Fernand David Césaire’sfamous poem, Return to My Native Land, and music that came from their hearts.