New to Hotel Yeoville

“How a Congo man became our Daddy !!! “
“We come 4rm SOWETO and our mother got married to a CONGO man. Then he became our dad. My baby sister and me are SOUTH AFRICANS by birth and he became the father we never had. He is the best thing 2 our mother and 2 us, and we love him very much. He is the best and that is how we ended up in YEOVILLE”.

A Map Submission/Hotel Yeoville Website/Yeoville Neighbourhood

Hotel Yeoville is a technology driven, multi-platform, participatory public art project. From February through December 2010, the project was housed inside the brand new public library in Yeoville, an old, neglected suburb on the Eastern edge of the inner city of Johannesburg. The majority of Yeoville’s estimated 40 000 inhabitants are migrants; micro communities from many parts of the African continent. Often isolated and excluded from the formal economy and mainstream South African society, their dominant engagement is with each other and with home in far away places. 

The project in the library aimed to key into the diversity of immigrant and South African experiences that make the legendary suburb such a hot melting pot, and comprised a website and an interactive exhibition installation which took the form of a series of 12 private booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through a range of digital interfaces, interactive media and online applications. Every actual, physical space in the exhibition in the library had a corresponding virtual space online. 

This short video made by filmmaker Brenda Goldblatt will give you an impression of the project in its Yeoville library context:

Between February and December of 2010, the Hotel Yeoville Project ran an interactive exhibition and web project from inside the brand new Yeoville Library on Raleigh Street. Every afternoon from 1 pm to 5 pm members of the public were invited to make videos, take photographs, tell stories, map journeys, read articles, add to the online directory, classifieds and more.  For an impression of the activities and products of the project you can view a slide show of images here .......

The Hotel Yeoville Project has just opened to the public in the brand new public library on Raleigh Street.  Hotel Yeoville is not a hotel!  It’s a community website and an interactive art project available for the use of residents of Yeoville and Bellevue. Adding a new frequency to the trans-continental whispers upstairs at the new  library, Hotel Yeoville is a ground-breaking public art project which, by way of freshly designed digital interfaces, keys into the diversity of immigrant and South African experiences that make the legendary suburb of Yeoville such a hot melting pot.  

Come into the library at the specific hours mentioned below, and check it out!  Raphael Bope, Godfrey Tshis Talabulu, and Brittany Wheeler are there to show you around and guide you through how to use it.

African Diaspora Forum (ADF)

The ADF is an umbrella organisation for people from the Diaspora who are resident in South Africa. The African Diaspora Forum is a non profit organisation open to all willing individuals and organisations sharing the objectives of the Forum. Its originality consists in the union of a number of organisations representing African migrant communities living in South Africa. So far 21 African countries are represented in the Forum: Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.  The organisation works for an integrated society, free of discrimination or any kind of xenophobia. It promotes tolerance, builds relationships between South Africans and Africans of the Diaspora and fosters a pride in being African.