On today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP Director Lauren Risi and Distinguished Fellow Dr. Blair Ruble talk with Clare Loveday and Dr. Caroline Wanjiku Kihato about their collaborative installation, “You Will Find Your People Here,” currently on view at La Biennale di Venezia. Loveday is a Johannesburg-based composer, and Kihato is an urban sociologist who specializes in gender, migration, and governance; they worked in concert with pianist, Mareli Stolp, and Ghanian artist, Awo Tsegah, to bring the installation to life at the Biennale.

Drawing from the migrant women’s testimonies in Kihato’s book, Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City, the project combines piano, spoken word, vocal utterances to share their stories. The performance is complemented by artwork and maps designed by Tsegah and informed by data obtained from the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab.

“You Will Find Your People Here” illustrates the value of using an interdisciplinary and creative process to convey the complex lives of migrant women, and the project speaks eloquently on how migration and mobility connect the global to local, transforming our cities and politics alike.

Select Quotes:

Dr. Caroline Kihato:

“When we were invited to exhibit at the Biennale, we had a film that was a performance of “You Will Find Your People Here,” but that was not enough. So, we had to expand this to fill space—but also tell a broader story. What we wanted to do is combine the intimate telling of these women’s lives in Johannesburg with data and an overall understanding of who moves, why do they move, and why Johannesburg is important. So, we used survey data collected by the Oxford Mobility Governance lab in 2021 that looked at mobility in different parts of Johannesburg. And we took that data and asked how we could tell this data story in ways that are worthy of a biennale exhibit, and use artifacts that migrant women might use to continue the thread of women moving through the city… We thought how wonderful it would be if we could use cloth that women would tie around their waists (or carry their babies in) to tell the data story. So, we took African designs, which have always been used to tell stories and send messages…and collaborated with an artist, Awo Tsegah, to convert bubble maps and graphs into designs that not only stay true to the data but are also connected to the women, whose stories we were telling.

Clare Loveday:

“These are very delicate stories, very personal human experiences of people who are partly vulnerable and partly create their own agency, and they are women’s voices. So often, we don’t hear women’s voices…and one of my big projects is to get women’s voices out there. So, it is [difficult] to tell these stories in a way that doesn’t cheapen them, doesn’t make them overly emotional, and doesn’t tell people how to feel, but rather pulls them into the experience of the story. When you set words to music, there is melody, but these are different, they are stories. Mareli Stolp was keen on the idea of a vocalizing pianist, so we were really wading around in unknown territory while at the same time trying to amplify these very human stories…That is what made it so difficult and complicated, trying to balance the human factor and the music factor.”

Dr. Caroline Kihato:

“All of a sudden, the stories leapt out of the page; they leapt out of this theoretical framework, empirical evidence, and footnotes that help qualify and bolster your argument. I was left standing, wondering how all of this was going to translate into music because I don’t even understand that process myself. So, there was a nervousness as I sat waiting to watch the premiere, but all I can say is I don’t understand what happened after that; the music took me from my head to my heart. I suddenly had this embodied sense of the women whom I had studied and spoken to for years, whose words I had read and re-read…I felt them anew, as if they were coming to me in a different form, but bringing insights that were so human that, as a social scientist, I am unable to speak about.”

Clare Loveday:

“It made me see my own city in a much more human way. [Johannesburg] is a very difficult place to negotiate. The moment you step out of your front gate, the problems hit you in the face, and driving around the city, you see these problems at a distance. However, working through Caroline’s stories and reading her book gave me a better sense of the very human dance that goes on in this city… And what writing this music taught me was to really respect the human element of this place.”

Dr. Caroline Kihato:

“The theme around wanting to be heard was very strong. It was interesting because there are ways in which people are very vulnerable. They may not have paperwork, they may be asylum seekers, and they might not want to be identified. This was a real ethical question for me: how does one tell stories about a population that could really be victimized because of who they are. But as I expressed my concern to the women, more and more they kept saying, “no, we want our voices and our stories to be heard”… And it made me think that all we want is to be regarded as human and to create that connectivity with others…It is that human desire to be hard and to be seen.”