Biography
After 8 Sistahood is a collective of women and non-binary people moving through African cities at night, on foot and by public transport. Refusing fear, we reclaim space, challenge surveillance and protection logics, and bring back joy into the night.
Synopsis
For A Stitch in Time, an anticipated 50 women per night will participate for an hour, sitting on cushions and low chairs along (we propose) the walkway adjacent to Michaelis Campus in the Company Gardens. In this way, their own footsteps will be traced in thread and conversation, unfolding as fabric across space and time. Festival-goers will be invited to draw up a chair, ask questions, or participate as they feel able.
The act of embroidering, with its associations with the feminine, the intimate, and the domestic, has often been relegated to the realm of familial craft, rather than recognized as a form of art and public knowledge. Yet for Black feminist traditions, practices of stitching, patchwork, and mending have long functioned as methods of survival—ways of holding memory, transmitting knowledge, and remaking worlds in the aftermath of violence. In dialogue with other transnational traditions of political embroidery, including Palestinian practices of tatreez (stitched testimony), this work approaches cloth not simply as material but as a living archive.
In a contemporary South African context, where histories and freedoms remain unevenly distributed, A Stitch in Time asks whether joy, safety, and connection can be meaningfully witnessed across differences. What value resides in proximity to another’s experience? What remains inaccessible? And what, if anything, can be shared?