2010 Yeoville Stories exhibition

This exhibition concluded the first year of the Studio. Located in Yeoville Recreation Center, it attracted a large crowd of Yeoville residents, and brought together the diverse participants to the Studio's activities. Focusing on Yeoville stories: voices, testimonies, images and sounds from the community, the exhibition triggered interesting discussions on Yeoville's identity and its perceptions, the desire for recognition, the need to challenge its stigmatisation without romanticising its current realities.

If Yeoville was a character

The “If Yeoville was a character” exercise was part of a series of workshops titled Yeoville Stories, part of the Wits School of Architecture and Planning’s Yeoville Studio project. At the workshops, run by Naomi Roux from Wits and Sophie Didier from the French Institute of South Africa, a group of Yeoville residents used various methods, including storytelling, drawing, mapping and photography to share stories and ideas about living in Yeoville and the journeys that have brought residents to the area.

A project facilitated by Naomi Roux and Sophie DidierFor this exercise, we began with the prompt: “If Johannesburg was a person...” to elicit ideas from participants about the city s perceived character. In general Johannesburg was seen as: male, young, adventurous, somewhat dangerous. We then narrowed the exercise down to focus on Yeoville as a character: interestingly, in contrast to the city as a whole, Yeoville was often described as female, nurturing, caring, motherly, and older. One participant described Johannesburg as a “grandmother” who took him in and cared for him when he arrived from Zimbabwe: Yeoville, in this description, was the grandmother’s beautiful daughter with whom he fell in love.

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