In the ever-shifting landscape of African cities, Cities in Motion, presented at this year’s Urban Action Festival, invited audiences to pause, observe, and reflect on the layered, improvisational textures of urban life. The exhibition offered not just a gallery of images, but a mapping of experiences, tensions, and imagined futures stitched together across cultures and time.
The exhibition foregrounded the importance of storytelling as an instrument for illustrating the joys and excitement in the big and small moments in the lived realities of urban residents. During the first plenary session of the 2025 Urban Action Festival Edgar Pieterse, Founding Director of the African Centre for Cities, noted that “Storytelling holds the key to building community resilience.” The Cities in Motion exhibition, mirrored this gesture through assembling narratives from different cities and voices to map out biographies of different cities through the residents’ lenses.
Photography offers us a language that reminds us that before we build cities on paper or policy, we experience them through streets, faces, textures, moments of celebration, of collective mourning and moments of gathering. As Deborah Johnson aptly notes, “We do not know what it is like to live in a world designed for us, by us — but we will.” The exhibition’s photographs made visible the worlds already in motion toward that future. In line with this, the exhibition was fluid in its functionality. In the afternoons the space was transformed into a dining hall for lunch setting the backdrop for reconnections, physical manifestations of virtual connections that were formed over years of online Action Festivals and a landing place for new collaborations and encounters. After lunch, it was transformed again as a site for Action sessions, presentations and workshops where session hosts and participants alike shared ideas, tools and their visions for their cities. This fluidity reinforced the exhibition’s premise: that African cities — like the exhibition itself — are not fixed or static, but constantly remade through collective gatherings, and knowledge exchange.
As part of grounding the festival in its historic location, Twyg in collaboration with art-fashion designer Oneisimo Bam curated a performance as part of the exhibition. The performance offered a visceral, dynamic retelling of the history of the Homecoming Centre’s origins as a textile warehouse in district six through spoken word by Uno July, and dance by Conway October choreographed by Luke De Kock. The performance paid homage to the workers who moved through the space before being displaced by the forced removals following the area’s declaration as a “whites-only” area in 1966.
Within the broader frame of the Urban Action Festival’s emphasis on just and inclusive cities, Cities in Motion served as both a mirror and a provocation. It refused easy narratives and invited audiences to consider African cities not as problems to be solved, but as living, contested terrains continuously shaped by those who inhabit them.