Interns:
Thanduxolo Mkhoyi
Grace Matetoa
Noluthando (Jupiter) Mpho Sibisi
This thematic internship was designed around Sean O’Toole’s research exhibition – Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! – and the parallel project Papertrails with francis burger and Jonah Sack in A4's Reading Room. It invited three successful applicants to engage with the foundation's day-to-day workings and offered particular insight into A4's publishing, library and printed matter. Coinciding with the Cape Town Art Fair, the programme also extended a crash course on the local arts ecology.
The internship programme culminated in participants' presentations of their research enquiries. Using prompt cards with images found and taken, Thando told the story of his recent reunification with estranged family and ancestors – a spiritual homecoming – and invited A4's team into a conversational gathering, using his chosen images to reflect on memory and storytelling. Similarly engaging prompts towards dialogue, Grace offered a multi-sensory reflection of her time at A4, and proposed a series of tools for understanding the experiences of others (among them, origami without instruction and a guided meditation). Pursuing a mode of serious play, Jupiter adapted the board game Snakes & Ladders to make Gladioli & Coffee, a game of chance accompanied by a key of prompts gathered from academic texts central to her research. The game – by way of the conversations it necessitated – considered variable frameworks for productive playfulness within the workplace.