This interdisciplinary live performance is a reckoning with history and the things unsaid/unnamed. The three-part performance piece interrogates the relevance of collective memory as a tool for the undressing and re-dressing of communal ‘wounds’ that exist in the afterlife of colonial rule and the violence of the apartheid era. Through storytelling in the form of music, poetry, movement and presence, the performance utilises the voices of women in the retelling of history to address the silences that perpetuate division/exclusion/erasure within the communities of Makhanda. In this retelling, the artists invoke a strategy of mothering and care with the use of the various aspects of Intsomi, acknowledging the weight of the residue of colonial trauma still present in the place today.

The three narratives weave into each other in fluid movement, negotiating themes of healing/cleansing, as well as the re-imagining of self in post-colonial times, thinking through the often ambiguous meaning/s of freedom. What would it mean to be able to listen to the silences, the erased and the ones who carry the heavy load of history while raising another generation? The performance ‘wonders out loud’ on the possibilities of new ways of being within a space of oppression and restriction.