Mauritius Photography at Cape Town Photography Festival 2025

A Dialogue on Heritage Through Photography

When I first learned about the Cape Town Photography Festival, my impression was that it wasn’t simply about looking back. It was about understanding how memory and place shape who we are now. That resonated deeply with me. I first heard about the open call through Sandra Mussard. At the time, only Karen Pang and Meha Desai were invited to exhibit. In a generous act of solidarity, they opened the door to other Mauritian artists through resort’s open call, turning the project into a collective effort rather than an individual one.

resort is a curatorial collective working at the intersection of art, publishing, and research, with a strong commitment to community care. Their approach to this exhibition ensured that the process, from selection to curation and coordination, was carried together, with care and passion.

I submitted Fading Places, Living Souls and was humbled to see it selected alongside the works of Karen Pang, Meha Desai, David Rogers, Laurent de Froberville, Audrey Albert, Melisa Madanamootoo, and Catherine Li . The photographs were curated with care under the banner of resort. Our group exhibition opens on 4 September at the Alliance Française in Cape Town.

Credit: Meha Desai

Credit: Karen Pang

Honouring the Visionary: Heidi Erdmann

At the festival’s helm stands Heidi Erdmann , the Festival Director. She is an award-winning curator and art historian, celebrated for her deep expertise in contemporary art and photography.

As the founding curator behind Erdmann Contemporary gallery in Cape Town, she has nurtured thoughtful, boundary-pushing exhibitions for more than two decades. Her approach combines meaningful content, context, and curation to bring photography to life, on and beyond the wall.

Through Heidi’s leadership, the festival becomes not just a showcase, but a space for artists and audiences to reflect on heritage in all its complexity.

Credit: Audrey Albert

Credit: Melissa Madanamootoo

Festival of a City: A Month-Long Celebration During Heritage Month

The inaugural Cape Town Photography Festival unfolds from 3 to 27 September 2025, coinciding with South Africa’s Heritage Month and culminating on Heritage Day, 24 September.

This intentional timing adds another layer of meaning: while heritage is the festival’s theme, the nation itself is also in a collective moment of reflection and celebration. Across Cape Town, Bellville, Simon’s Town, Stellenbosch, and Kalk Bay, exhibitions, talks, and workshops bring together South African and international photographers. The 6 Spin Street Gallery serves as the central hub, alongside partner venues like Simon’s Town Museum, Aspire Art, Artvark Gallery, and the Central Library.

The opening of our exhibition at Alliance Française will also feature music by Babani Records , whose work in restoring and celebrating music traditions of Mauritius and the wider Indian Ocean keeps cultural memory alive through sound. Their contribution adds another layer to the conversation on heritage, reminding us that memory lives not only in images, but also in rhythm and song.

It is a festival of scale, ambition, and dialogue, placing heritage at its core.

Credit: Catherine Li

Credit: David Rogers

A Personal Reflection: Fading Places, Living Souls

This series was created in 2018, during a day of street photography when I unexpectedly found myself walking through the street and yard where I grew up as a child, beside my grandparents’ home. What I encountered was no longer the world I remembered. The timber houses were collapsing, left to decay and abandonment.

Compelled by the moment, I photographed what was left: leaning doors, rusted hooks, fragments of wood. Each frame carried with it the weight of stories: family meals, childhood laughter, and the quiet passage of time.

I later expanded the series by photographing similar homes, some still lived in and others already falling into decay, in the region where I grew up.

Fading Places, Living Souls is my way of paying tribute to those spaces and the heritage they held. A reminder that even as walls fall, memory endures.

Credit: Javed Jeetoo

Credit: Laurent de Froberville

In the Words of the Curators (resort)

“ This was my home:

The heritage we hold is fragmented; on our island, our lost and silenced histories loom over us.

As we try to make sense of the loopholes in our identities we latch on to the familiar and for as much as our island’s economic pursuits look towards a future, us inhabitants cannot get away from a sentimental longing and affection for an abstract past, tethered to nostalgia like a grafted limb we cannot get rid of.

The photographs in our exhibition do not try to define anything.

They observe. They return. They sit gently with what’s unresolved.

The works hold aspirations of an outdated simpler life, employing a kind of hauntology in their essence.

Some pieces unambiguously pull toward the past, warmed by retro palettes and softened light. Others resist, working through land, labour, and lineage as ways of standing up to sentimentality. Together, they form a loose weave: not coherent, but resonant.

Some images begin before the shutter: in the texture of a hand-me-down sari, in the way someone arranges fruit, or remembers a dance without music.

Our selection grew from conversations that circled memory, repetition, and the urge to make something hold still. Images that trace inheritance through small rituals, through things that stay away from the spectacle: what someone wears on a Monday, what someone carries to work, the shape of a gesture passed between generations.

Photography here listens. It stumbles. It stays.

If there is heritage in this exhibition, it’s quiet. Not the kind etched in stone, but the kind that lives in reimagining - in the tension between what is remembered and what is no longer accessible.

This is not a statement. It’s a mood. A murmuration. A slow conversation between artists who are still figuring it out, together.”

Collective Pride

As a group of Mauritian photographers, we feel proud to bring our perspectives on heritage to an international exhibition of this calibre. Each of us speaks from a different place, but together we share a thread of memory, identity, and belonging.

For me, the opportunity to present my work alongside such voices in Cape Town is both humbling and deeply meaningful. I remain grateful to the resort team for making this journey possible.

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