From December 2024 to March 2025, I participated in a four-month residency at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. My residency formed part of a broader artistic-research project titled Ingoduko, a homecoming to indigenous musical knowledge, centred on the Xhosa musical bow, uhadi.
The heart of my project was an instrument-making workshop where I guided ten participants through building and learning to play uhadi. Participants came from varied musical and cultural backgrounds, creating a space of meaningful exchange, collaboration, and mutual learning. I brought most of the materials with me from South Africa — the calabashes, sticks, strings, and tuning pegs — while we gathered some locally, such as the beating sticks from the Buchstein forest in Bayreuth, which added a beautiful layer of place-based resonance to the process.
The workshop culminated in two public concerts and a pop-up exhibition: the first on 8 March at Südpunkt in Nuremberg, and the second on 13 March at Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth. Both concerts featured the participants performing with the instruments they had built, a moving moment of shared artistry and cultural dialogue. These events showcased the sonic beauty of uhadi and underscored the importance of indigenous instruments as vessels of memory, heritage, and community.
On 22 March, I had the privilege of performing at Steingraeber Pianos in Bayreuth in collaboration with pianist Coila-Leah Enderstein. This experimental performance explored temporalities, improvisation, and audience participation, expanding the boundaries of traditional and contemporary musical dialogues.
Throughout the residency, we documented the entire process through film and photography, which will form part of a larger exhibition and research output. This experience allowed me to deepen my research into the ideogrammatic archive, a framework I use to understand instruments as memory-evoking objects, while fostering new relationships with scholars, musicians, and communities engaged in African studies.
The residency was a profoundly affirming experience, reminding me once again of the power of sound to carry us home.
