I am a visual documentary maker, and am interested in the ways people make home and belonging in differing spaces. Cape Town, the city I call home, is a city of great contrasts. Different worlds on different days.
I am fascinated by the ways individuals and groups ebb and flow navigating and negotiating the contesting landscape, post apartheid, in the messiness and rawness of everyday life.
www.sydellewillowsmith.com
Women preach on the morning trains heading from Khayelitsha to Cape Town
Preaching on the trains
Blikkiesdorp is a Temporary Relocation Area on the outskirts of the city, where a cacophony of voices are demanding housing from the government. The site deemed temporary has been in operation since 2008. The structures are 18m2 , a wash trough and toilet is shared between four homes. There is constant violence relating to gangs and social dynamics. People live and get by , making forms of home as they go.
I wrote my Honors in Anthropology Thesis about the space and my attempt at making a participatory film/photo project that revealed the politics of ownership of voice.
Woodstock, The Prophets Birthday
Woodstock, Barber Shop
School kids help paint a mural at their school, Usuzazo, in Khayelitsha as part of a Water Writes project funded by the Estria Foundation
Paul Senyol, a visual artist takes a break from painting the mural with two new friends
Someones home at the Central Methodist Church, a refuge for immigrants mostly from Zimbabwe, in Johannesburg South Africa.
Cooking cows hooves on a Sunday Afternoon in Soweto.
A Tent Church without its congregation, late on a Sunday Afternoon, Soweto.
A group of assylum seekers queue outside Maitland Refugee Centre in Cape Town at 4am on a Thursday morning in winter.
Workers at The University of Cape Town protest for better wages, February 2008.
A boy plays in a makeshift home in Hillbrow during a red ant eviction spree in the city of Johannesburg.
A home in Phillipi, Cape Town South Africa, Shot for The African Centre for Cities
My late Grandmother, Jeannette Sadie Cohen, at home with her crossword.
A man , Dudley Lee, who contracted TB while in prison at the old age home where he lives in Cape Town.
Shot for the Mail and Guardian.
A Kaizer Chiefs fan poses for a photo after a game is cancelled due to a freak hail storm at Soccer City, Johannesburg.
A security guard in Johannesburg shows off his chair made from tyres.
A Swazi woman looks into her home while two South American artists get ready to paint it completely white as part of an installation piece, Tabula Rasa , for Bushfire Music Festival. May 2012.
A man polishes his shoes in Soweto, wearing a T Shirt warning Gold Diggers that they digging in the wrong place.
Local experimental band, The Brothers Moves on , during a publicity shoot in Woodstock Cape Town.
Partygoers at the annual lavish, JnB Met, Kenilworth Racetrack, Cape Town
Partygoers at a popular nightclub in Cape Town, Fiction, dance to the electronic music of the legendary artist Felix La Band.
Makeshift homes for the weekend of Synergy Music Festival in the Western Cape of South Africa, December 2012
Synery Music Festival, electronic music stage
