Rewriting the City Keyes Art Night — Makers Table, June Edition

The next edition of the Keyes Art Night Makers Table, presented in collaboration with Johannesburg In Your Pocket and Open Window, continues the ongoing exploration of urban development, regeneration, and the evolving cultural landscape surrounding the advancing Keyes Art Mile 2.0 precinct.

For the June session, participants will work with a selection of historical black-and-white photographs of Johannesburg’s architecture, streetscapes, and urban environments drawn from the archive of Marc Latilla, author of Johannesburg Then and Now. The photographs, which document different eras of the city’s growth and transformation, will become the starting point for a collaborative process of hand-colouring, collage, drawing, and speculative intervention.

Through acts of cutting, layering, colouring, and reimagining, participants will be invited to reflect on how cities are continuously constructed, erased, repaired, and reinvented over time. The workshop proposes Johannesburg not as a fixed or completed city, but as an unfinished and contested space shaped by memory, aspiration, infrastructure, migration, decay, resilience, and imagination.

By working directly onto archival imagery, the session creates a dialogue between past and future: between the Johannesburg that was documented and the Johannesburg still to come. Participants may choose to imagine ecological futures, new forms of public space, impossible architectures, utopian interventions, or deeply personal responses to the city and its shifting identity.

Positioned within the broader context of the Keyes Art Mile 2.0 development, the Makers Table continues to explore how creative practice can become a way of thinking through urban change, not only observing development, but actively imagining alternative futures for Johannesburg and the communities that inhabit it.