Sonic Lecture: Toyi-Toyi w/ Masimba Hwati
Join us next Thursday March 19th for a Sonic lecture ‘Toyi-Toyi’ with our exhibiting artist: Masimba Hwati, as part of Sustaining the Otherwise: Practicing Freedom and Refusal.Toyi-Toyi activates sound, movement, and collective memory as living archives of struggle. Drawing from Chidzimbahwe philosophies of sound and liberation, Masimba Hwati invites audiences into a pedagogy of humility, where listening involves the whole body and understanding emerges through movement, proximity, and collective pulse.
This program title references southern Africa’s history of protest and liberation movements. Toyi-Toyi is a high-kneed foot-stomping dance, rhythmically punctuated by chants and call and response. After the end of apartheid, toyi-toyi did not disappear. It can also be observed at many kinds of protest in South Africa and Zimbabwe today and remains a common and potent form of protest in contemporary South Africa, used by trade unions, community groups, and students.
19:00
Doors open
19:30
Performance lecture start
🔥Date: Thursday march 19th
🔥Time: 18:00 - 21:00
🔥Location: Westerdoksdijk 597,
🔥Free, please RSVP here
Masimba Hwati works across sound, sculpture, and performance, tracing everyday acts of resistance, negotiation, and survival. Drawing on indigenous philosophies and sonic vibrational knowing, his practice treats sound not as accompaniment but as an active, emerging, and relational force—one that carries memory, conflict, and ancestral continuities across time and place.