Thirty-two years into Freedom Day, we remember how art and photography were silenced when they should have spoken loudest. In Paternoster, a different rhythm is rising. The Whose Freedom exhibition, born from MaseKhaya and West Coast Kids, placed cameras in children's hands - and with them, a voice no one can take. Because time is more valuable than money, and we made children, but how do we raise them if not by trusting them to document their own world? What unfolds is a decolonised curriculum, a methodology of love, a command to keep shooting and never stop. Freedom looks like small hands on a camera, a story told from the inside.

From personal grief to collective possibility, Breeze Yoko’s inaugural Cape Town Print Fair transformed an empty city space into a living conversation about print, community, access, and the future of South African creative economies.

She wore heels that struck the concrete with a deliberate clarity, each step a punctuation. Bangles lined her arms, a soft chime of metal against metal, and from her shoulders rose a pair of wings. They were delicate, sculptural things, neither costume nor mere ornament but something in between: an extension of her, a declaration that she had chosen to arrive differently tonight. The wings caught the amber light, turning with her as she moved through the gathering, and the bubbles drifting past seemed to adjust their course around her, as though the air itself had learned a new choreography.

“You are the chosen one in your own fields, and now you are the chosen one in this village called home.” On 14 March 2026, the MAI team gathered at the Radisson Collection Hotel in Cape Town to celebrate Zanele Muholi — not only for their historic Hasselblad Award, but for the community they continue to build and hold.

For ten days in March 2026, the Muholi Art Institute (MAI) brought its immersive photography programme, Photo XP, to the small town of Vredendal in the Western Cape. The journey began not with cameras, but with people — home visits, handshakes, and building trust within a community anchored by the beloved eighty-year-old founder of the Ray Swartz Foundation.

Guided by facilitator Lindeka Qampi, eight young learners from Vredendal Primary School explored the power of image-making as a tool for storytelling, identity, and self-expression. From creating handmade poetry booklets to mastering the rule of thirds and capturing moving self-portraits, the participants discovered that photography is about more than just taking pictures — it is about communicating personal stories and seeing their world through new eyes.

Read the full diary of the 5-day journey to see how respect, creativity, and visual storytelling unfolded in Vredendal.

There are some gatherings that are simply about showing up. And then there are gatherings where something quietly shifts — where a group of strangers becomes a collective, where a city stops being a backdrop and becomes part of the work itself. The MAI AiR Cape Town residency in February 2026 was the second kind.

For thirteen days, seventeen artists from four continents came together in Cape Town. We arrived with different practices, different histories. But somewhere along the way, something clicked. The city was not just where we stayed — it was what we worked with.

For the MAI AiR Panama Residency 2026, writer and researcher Mpho Molefe offers a meditation on a single day in Panama City — a day that moved through the sensory chaos of a food market, the quiet wisdom of the Museo de la Mola, and the stoic halls of the Casa de la Municipalidad.

What began as simple curiosity became a profound recalibration. In the museum, a Guna guide's explanation transformed the vibrant mola textiles from decorative craft into something far deeper: a language, a shield, a woman carrying a prayer for protection stitched into the very clothes on her body. Later, in the hushed corridors of city government, the weight of civic responsibility—the invisible labour of permits, zoning, and infrastructure—revealed itself as the bedrock upon which all art, all beauty, all storytelling ultimately rests.

“Creativity does not flow in a vacuum,” Molefe writes. “It flows through copper pipes laid by public works contracts. It flourishes under streetlights maintained by municipal budgets. The romance and the bureaucracy are not opposites; they are co-dependents.”

Read the full reflection on how a market, a museum, and a municipal building reshaped one artist's understanding of what holds a city — and its stories — together.