IGoli EGoli

Description

IGoli EGoli is a sociopolitical reading of Johannesburg/iGoli, drawing on its famous, and not so famed, people, places, plants and pronouncements. Featuring the city’s well known and lesser known histories, presents, and words, the medium used is poetry: for its unique ability to tap into the emotional, the subconscious, the unsaid, that underlie many of the city’s motivations.

While not shying from violence and divisions, iGoli is presented as a meeting place: a place of ‘original’, transnational, subnational, and primordial origins.

Building on Valiani’s poetry collection 29 leads to love, fragments of the larger love found in Jozi pepper the collection. These love fragments , and iterations of inimba (empathy, as loosely translated from isiXhosa), are offered as leads to building unity. Via themes of migration, ecology, and a range of lived experiences of inequality, Igoli Egoli offers a pathbreaking means to reconsider and reform the contested city.