INVITATION: ‘Facing the Heat in South Africa’ Photography Exhibition

 

EXHIBITION FROM 4 MAR – 6 MAY 2026 | VENUE: ORIGINS CENTRE

 

Southern Africa is heating at twice the global average.
With the failure of the UN multi-lateral process to
rapidly phase out fossil fuels, the world has lost the
opportunity to prevent a 1.5°C overshoot. South Africa
and the region have to brace for 3°C of heating. The
country is completely unprepared for this post-normal
reality.
Through ten years of photographic documentation, this
exhibition and book brings into focus unfolding climate
shocks, injustice and resistance post a 1°C overshoot at
the global level. It furnishes powerful insights into the
structural drivers and complexity of climate extremes,
while foregrounding how the meaning of weather has
changed. The deployed photographic optic brings clarity
to the notion of climate risk in everyday life. Moreover,
this work, as a photographic archive, also provides
forensic evidence for how an uncaring and criminalised
political leadership, addicted to fossil fuels, is force
marching the country into climate disaster.
Ultimately the photographic medium echoes the
warnings of climate science but also amplifies the case
for climate justice solutions to secure a livable, just and
democratic future for all. As author and curator of this
exhibition, Vishwas Satgar, wrestles with the question:
what is photography’s role in these times of planetary
crisis? All are invited to view the exhibition.

 

 

 

Inaugural Lecture of Professor Vishwas Satgar

The Coloniality of the Planetary Crisis – Possible Emancipatory Politics and Futures.

The discipline of International Relations has not kept its promise of securing world peace and neither can it grasp the destruction of the planetary commons. It is also steeped in a Western conception of ‘Westphalian’ politics such that it thinks the ‘international’ in ways that perpetuates imperial asymmetries. This critical and decolonial lecture will highlight scalar levels of crisis that take us beyond the ‘national’ and  ‘global’ and will challenge the normalising of planetary crisis by failing power structures and Anthropocene discourses. To meet the challenges of planetary crisis the ‘political’ has to be rethought. This lecture will  highlight the urgency of emancipatory political imaginaries and praxis to secure planetary life.

Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a Professor of International Relations, editor of the democratic Marxism series and principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene.

Launch of the COPAC Food Sovereignty Hub

Launch of Food Sovereignty Hub and Activist Training Centre at Wits

Today was one of those days when life sparkles and you know that after ten years of consistent transformative activism at Wits, change is happening!

We launched the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre Food Sovereignty Hub and Activist Training Centre with activists from Gauteng communities, the Climate Justice Charter Movement and the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign. This is the second hub at Wits and will be the backbone for all our agroecology gardens and forests. It will also be a space for emancipatory pedagogy, zero-input cost agroecology farming research and larger institutional transformation of Wits to accelerate the deep just transition.

These photos offer a glimpse into our agroecology garden, tool bank, seed bank, training space, water harvesting tanks, and more.

We also married this launch to a 4-day activist school and launched the Gauteng Food Sovereignty Forum and process.

I won’t see how the seed sharing, knowledge, and food sovereignty praxis travels into the years ahead and amongst generations. But knowing that foundations have been laid for this brings me immense joy.

Thanks to all the students, activists, academics, WCCO colleagues, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and the EMS Foundation for your support over the years. Without you, we would not have come this far!”

Professor Vishwas Satgar

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