Holding Ground is a multilingual live performance that weaves story-theatre, song, and poetry to explore home, memory, and connection across distance. Rooted in the artist’s South African - German heritage, it reflects on life between languages, homelands, and generations through quilt-making and beadwork. At its core is a patchwork of modern-day “love letters” - WhatsApp messages, voice notes, screenshots, and music links - transformed into quilted squares. This evolving quilt becomes a soft archive of care, an attempt to hold what is often intangible or fleeting.
The work draws on personal narrative and research into the visual poetics of German Blaudruck/Isishweshwe textiles and Southern African beadwork love letters, tracing material heritage movements through German–South African trade histories into personal meaning-making. These communal traditions, alongside stories passed down by grandmothers at the sewing machine and photo album, shape a performance that is both intimate and resonant. Audience members are gently invited into the act of quilting - passing a pin, holding the image - participating in a shared practice of “holding ground.” From the fragments of memory, language, lineage and homes, an alchemical process of making home in the in-between takes place and cannot be done alone.
"Our children live in the most deprived ward in London and their parents cannot afford to pay for the classes and activities many more privileged children enjoy after school and at the weekends. A free-to-access youth group run by a local theatre in a professional setting is an incredible opportunity."
Local school teacher
