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.
“It means so much to be working at CPT, it’s such a good opportunity to work in a professional environment at my age. I didn’t think that was ever going to happen and it means the world to me. It’s really going to help prepare me for my future and where I want to go”
CYT participant and Camden student
