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The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember

@thelibraryo

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An interactive sound and visual archive of Black resistance. Materials include vinyls, posters, paintings, photographs, publications and more.

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“Songs We Inherited” is a listening session from The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember’s archive, presented as part of @designweeksouthafrica 2026.

Join us for an afternoon in the library with records from the archive playing throughout.

Saturday, 10 October

2PM–5PM

@44_stanleyavenue, Johannesburg

Poster design by @thebiggestbones taken in 44 Stanley Avenue by @thelibraryo

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3 days ago

“Songs We Inherited” is a listening session from The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember’s archive, presented as part of @designweeksouthafrica 2026.

Join us for an afternoon in the library with records from the archive playing throughout.

Saturday, 10 October

2PM–5PM

@44_stanleyavenue, Johannesburg

Poster design by @thebiggestbones taken in 44 Stanley Avenue by @thelibraryo

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4 days ago

Slow Down: A Conversation with Neo Muyanga

An interdisciplinary art piece merging music, film and interview. Musician Matshidiso released an album at the end of 2025, ‘IDKL’. One of the tracks on the album, Slow Down explores connection, being present, welcoming mundanity, even boredom.

Matshidiso invited composer-musician, installation artist and creative director at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Neo Muyanga to take her to the places in Joburg that hold significance for him. They spoke about all kinds of things: storytelling, archiving, the act of making, music and the intentional act of slowing down.

Join Matshidiso and Neo for the preview screening of this work hosted by legendary journalist @brendasisane at The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember.

📍EDIT | Thank you for the RSVPs. This screening is now FULLY BOOKED. taken in 44 Stanley Avenue by @thelibraryo

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6 days ago

Inspired by the radicalism of Miles Davis, his restraint, his rhythm, his refusal to repeat himself.

Davis understood that innovation doesn’t always arrive loudly. Sometimes it lives in the pause. In the space between notes. In knowing exactly what to leave out.

Wanda Lephoto (@wandalephoto) has always been interested in what exists beneath the surface, the histories, objects and cultural fragments that shape how we see ourselves. Ballo (@ballo.sun) builds frames from the ground up using plant-based bioacetate, rooted in Africa and made as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics.

Together, the two meet somewhere between memory and modernity, rhythm and form, Johannesburg and ballo city.
The result is a frame informed by Davis’s way of seeing: uncompromising, minimal, expressive without excess. A silhouette familiar, but never quite what you expect.
Not made to follow a trend. Made to become part of the archive.
Limited run. Handcrafted. Made to outlast the moment that made it.

📍 & by Andticks (@and_ticks), Nine Yards (@nineyardsjhb), Parktown North

🗓️ Saturday, 10 October 12:00 – 17:00

RSVP to attend via the Design Week South Africa website.

Known for modernizing traditional craftsmanship, Houtlander (@houtlander) specializes in minimalist, timeless pieces, particularly its signature spindle furniture crafted from sustainably harvested American White Oak.

Transforming its Joburg showroom into a gallery, Houtlander will screen a short film that showcases the practical use of creativity to solve a problem – where every sale helps restore someone’s sight.

📍 Houtlander Store, Nine Yards (@nineyardsjhb)

🗓️ Friday, 9 October from 18:00 – 21:00

Open to the public to attend.

Songs We Inherited is an intimate listening session exploring the music, memories and cultural inheritances we carry with us. Drawing from The Library’s vinyl archive, invited DJs and selectors share records that speak to lineage, place, identity and the sounds passed between generations. Guests are invited to listen, gather and experience the archive as a living space for memory, conversation and connection.

📍 The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember (@thelibraryo)
44 Sta taken in Johannesburg, South Africa by @thelibraryo

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7 days ago

Afterlives: What We Hold for One Another

Open Call for Listeners

How do people inherit, carry, transmit, and care for histories that institutions overlook, fragment, or fail to hold?

The project considers the family as an infrastructure for remembering, a place where histories are held and transmitted through people, objects, stories and everyday practices.

For this gathering, ten storytellers will bring an object from a biological or chosen family archive and share the story that they carry with it.

I am inviting up to 20 people to participate as Listeners.

The role of the Listener is not simply to hear a story, but to enter into a relationship of transmission. With permission, Listeners are asked to carry the stories they hear beyond the gathering, sharing them orally with others, in perpetuity.

The work asks what happens when remembering becomes a form of collective labour: when histories are not only preserved, but carried between people; when the family archive becomes a point of entry into a much larger social world; and when ordinary acts of listening, remembering and retelling become ways of holding histories that might otherwise be forgotten.

The gathering intentionally refuses documentation in the form of photography, filming, audio recording, or written transcriptions, rejecting traditional methods of preservation in favour of collective memory. The stories are therefore not collected into a permanent archive, with their afterlives depending on their movement between people.

10:30 – 13:30
Sunday, September 6, 2026
The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember
44 Stanley, Johannesburg

If you would like to participate as a Listener, please follow the link in my bio for more information and to RSVP. Once places are filled, further RSVPs will be held on a waitlist and contacted should a place become available.

To collectively remember is to honour memory, lived experience, and the histories we carry as legitimate forms of knowledge — and to resist the limits of what has been deemed history. taken in 44 Stanley Avenue by @thelibraryo

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a month ago

Join us tomorrow, 18 April, for an “open house” to hear the library’s vinyl collection, shaped by the perspectives of writers, artists, and cultural workers.

Come through over the course of the day and lounge with us, as Maneo Mohale, Lynnée Denise, Vusi Metalo and Livhuwani Ramalivhana share what they found digging through the library’s archive.

#recordstoreday #zimbabweindependenceday taken in 44 Stanley Avenue by @thelibraryo

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6 months ago

VINYL SPOTLIGHT

DOCTEUR NICO: KASSANDA WA MIKALAY (1982)

Born Nicolas Kasanda wa Mikalay in 1939 in the Belgian Congo, Dr. Nico picked up a guitar as a teenager and at 14, he was already the featured guitarist on one of the biggest hits in the Congo. When Jimi Hendrix passed through Paris, one of the musicians he made a point to seek out was Dr. Nico.

His ascent as a musician came alongside a historic moment on the African continent. In 1960, as Congo won its independence from Belgian colonial rule, Dr. Nico was an important contributor to the soundtrack of liberation; playing lead guitar on Independence Cha Cha, a song that became an anthem for a newly liberated people. Nico, then 20, and his brother Charles Mwamba, called “Dechaud”, had been invited to perform in Brussels during the very negotiations that would determine the Congo’s post-colonial future. The music and the movement were inseparable.

Beyond a single song, Dr. Nico was among the architects of the genres that came to define Congolese music, pioneering the style that would shaped rumba and its descendants, soukous, kwasa kwasa and zouk. He passed away in 1985, at 46.

Track: Vempol by @thelibraryo

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7 months ago

Presenting sonic lecture about the important role of jazz and musicians during apartheid through listening, today in Joburg - something I've written on and worked on for years - but there is still so much to learn and dig into and unearth... Always in the process of studying.

Big thanks to the @blackfuturewa, @omonblanks, @el_metalo and the @thelibraryo for hosting.
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📸 @itsibitsikitsi by @thelibraryo

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8 months ago

Hope to meet you on Saturday & together we share our stories & journeys through art, dialogue and music.

Please RSVP on the Link in Bio or DM for more details.

Together with Thobani K, we're presenting a dialogue-driven exploration of our evolving practices, rooted in themes of collaboration, memory, water apartheid, music, and cultural reclamation. taken in The Library of Things We Forgot To Remember by @thelibraryo

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8 months ago

My book has finally arrived Home 🇿🇦!

Available soon in South African bookstores and archives.
Further information regarding the release book launch dates will follow:

Cape Town
– Khayelitsha Library
– Chimurenga Library
– UCT Hiddingh Hall Library
– A4 Arts Foundation
– Clarks Books
– The Book Lounge

Eastern Cape
– East London Museum
– Stutterheim Main Library
– University of Fort Hare Library
- National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre

Johannesburg
– The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember
– Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts
– Bridge Books
– Johannesburg Main Library (Michaelis Art collection)

Please pre-order by emailing your nearest library/bookstore.

Camagu 2025 Makube chosi kube hele!! 🙏🏿

#Books
#AfricanArtist
#HomeComing
#TimeAndSpace
#ArtisticResearchWork
SouthAfricanBookstores
SenseOfSpace-PrepositionOfPlace taken in South Africa by @thelibraryo

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9 months ago

Nyami-Nyami – A sculptural installation and sound performance by The Zebra Collective

Nyami-Nyami is an immersive multimedia installation and performance by the renowned artist duo Masimba Hwati and Michael Gould, AKA the Zebra Collective. This gripping work reimagines the cultural and ecological trauma caused by the colonial construction of the Kariba Dam in the then-Rhodesia in the 1950s, and its lasting impact on the Tonga people. In this video, Lebohang Mojapelo talks to the artists about their creative process.

Nyami-Nyami was presented in 2025 by the University of Johannesburg’s Artists In Residence Programme in collaboration with VIAD Research Centre’s Bioart+Design Africa Research Programme, Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember and 44 Stanley, and supported by the National Research Foundation.

Nyami-Nyami was presented in 2025 by the University of Johannesburg’s Artists In Residence Programme in collaboration with VIAD Research Centre’s Bioart+Design Africa Research Programme, Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember and 44 Stanley, and supported by the National Research Foundation and the Aria Grant (Arts, Research, Incubation and Acceleration), University of Michigan.

#transcending #nyaminyami #soundperformance #alternateuniverse #sculpturalinstallation #soundart by @thelibraryo

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a year ago

Nyami-Nyami – A sculptural installation and sound performance by The Zebra Collective

Nyami-Nyami is an immersive multimedia installation and performance by the renowned artist duo Masimba Hwati and Michael Gould, AKA the Zebra Collective. This gripping work reimagines the cultural and ecological trauma caused by the colonial construction of the Kariba Dam in the then-Rhodesia in the 1950s, and its lasting impact on the Tonga people. In this video, Lebohang Mojapelo talks to the artists about their creative process.

Nyami-Nyami was presented in 2025 by the University of Johannesburg’s Artists In Residence Programme in collaboration with VIAD Research Centre’s Bioart+Design Africa Research Programme, Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember and 44 Stanley, and supported by the National Research Foundation.

Nyami-Nyami was presented in 2025 by the University of Johannesburg’s Artists In Residence Programme in collaboration with VIAD Research Centre’s Bioart+Design Africa Research Programme, Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember and 44 Stanley, and supported by the National Research Foundation and the Aria Grant (Arts, Research, Incubation and Acceleration), University of Michigan.

#transcending #nyaminyami #soundperformance #alternateuniverse #sculpturalinstallation #soundart by @thelibraryo

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a year ago