Memory Biwa

Memory Biwa worked as a project officer for a Namibian/ German funded initiative, Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance and the Liberation Struggle Project (AACRLS), at the National Archives of Namibia in 2007. As a Volkswagen Foundation grantee, she worked with colleagues from Angola, Namibia and Germany on a project, "Reconciliation and Social Conflict in the Aftermath of large-scale Violence in Southern Africa: the cases of Angola and Namibia", between 2007 and 2011. She completed her doctoral research and thesis, "Weaving the Past with Threads of Memory": Narratives and Commemorations of the Colonial War in Southern Namibia, at the University of the Western Cape in 2012.  Biwa is a postdoctoral fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (APC) at the University of Cape Town, and is presently conducting research on the sound and photographic collection of Ernst and Ruth Dammann.Biwa has presented her work at Point Sud in Bamako, Mali in 2007, and at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 2010, the second European Sound Studies Association conference at the University of Copenhagen in 2014, the Max Planck Institute in Halle, Germany and co-organised a Southern Africa Archives workshop at the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2014. Biwa has also collaborated with various artists and researchers on performance interventions/activations in Cape Town in 2012 and 2014 respectively.Biwa was born in Windhoek, Namibia, and Cape Town now serves as her home and creative hub.