Textures of Time
Textures of Time and other gestures into the city space is a sound-based exhibition by PlayGroup, featuring five interconnected ambient sound installations unfolding across the Goethe-Institute’s gallery and surrounds. The project accentuates the auditory narrative of space, both interior and exterior, through gentle sonic interventions that cut across architectural and social boundaries. Developed through a process-based methodology, the work integrates workshops, intermittent performances, and public activations, where listening becomes both method and medium. It reflects on the affective experience of living in and through the city, its divisions, resonances, and silences.
Medea (Nov 2025)
Medea
Altazor Soundtrack (Oct 2025)
ALTAZOR
A performance by the young artists of the Windybrow Art Centre
Presented at the Wits Anglo American Digital Dome for the opening of the Fakugesi Digital Arts Festival on 9 October 2025 (Final dress rehearsal)
Directed by: Sibahle Mthimkhulu & Gerard Bester
Poem adaptation of Altazor by Vicente Huidobro, adapted by Stacy Hardy (Wits Creative Writing)
Soundscape: Playgroup (Jill Richards, BJ Engelbrecht, Jurgen Meekel) featuring Fried Wilsenach Audio mix: 8.1
A poem falls through Johannesburg and lands in Hillbrow.
Inner-city youths free-fall into an uncertain future, mouths bright with dreams and stars.
In Altazor, or the Parachute Got Stuck in the Ponte Tower, descent becomes art, poems beside planets, African cosmology against city sirens, and sound experiments ricocheting off concrete.
This interdisciplinary work rewires Vicente Huidobro’s 1919 avant-garde masterpiece Altazor, or A Voyage in a Parachute. Huidobro—poet, visionary, agitator—believed that a poem should not mirror the world but make one. A century later, the Césaire Youth take that dare.
From the Windybrow Art Centre in Hillbrow, they route Huidobro’s cosmic fall through elevators, balconies, taxi ranks, and night winds speaking in the many tongues of Jozi. Language fractures, then sings. A multilingual chorus breathes together until syntax splinters and reassembles.
The city teaches a poem how to fall.
The poem teaches a city how to rise.
Sensing Sonics Residency
Sensing Sonics was a half-day long collaborative and experimental workshop based on aural cartography of the city, as realised through field recording and field notes, with a specific focus on ‘The Poetry of Small Things’. Part of a broader set of research projects that investigate sound and the city space, the series explores the relationship between the listening body and the urban sonic landscape. The city, with its inherent dissonances and harmonies, presents a unique opportunity to explore the interplay of social interaction, temporal dynamics, and a wider network of relationships that sound reveals. ‘The Poetry of Small Things’ points us towards the fleeting moments of everyday life, the barely audible, the distant, the background, the easily forgotten, the fine grains, something familiar or hidden.
Sasrim
Sonic Vocabularies is a collaborative performance project by PlayGroup (Barend Engelbrecht, Jill Richards, Jurgen Meekel) and musician-scholar Cara Stacey. Presented as an experimental music performance accompanied by projected video, the piece investigates how disparate sonic sources might speak to each other across spatial, temporal, and medial boundaries. Drawing from a palette of African musical instruments, prepared piano, foley techniques, field recordings, and an archive of harpsichord fragments, the work explores sound as a relational medium through which diverse cultural, material, and historical resonances converge. The performance was framed not by linear composition but through improvisational logics of call and response, layering, and interruption, allowing for an unfolding sonic dialogue that challenged conventions of coherence, genre, and temporality.
Somewhere in-between
playgroup = Johannesburg based art collective Jill Richards – BJ Engelbrecht – Jurgen Meekel and animation by Andrea Rolfes
Was the Past Silent
Membranes
Membranes Description
20 Janets (Nov 2021)
20 Janets (album)
We want to discover and listen to what is around us. The world is an interesting space sonically. To listen to new spaces and how humans and other living beings inhabit them. Part of the listening is the recording process, as it makes one more attentive to what’s actually happening sonically, as opposed to the filtering process that is part of our everyday hearing.
Listening is a process of sonic discovery of the spaces that we choose to visit. In terms of the city, this means listening to people’s lives and activities. Every day sounds thus takes on its own importance.
The recording is the start of that process, as is the listening part of the process afterwards. Followed by a creative/artistic process where we edit the recordings, either by
1. segmenting them into standalone sonic archives
2. editing them as they are as soundscape pieces, or …
3. by adding our own soundscape/musical material as we did with 20 Janets. We are more interested in this creative process than the end result.
What purpose does this serve? We record and also make our own sounds, edit them in a “hand-made way”, enjoy the act of making something – in short, we are making a group document of our creative selves.
released November 1, 2021