Kusbarra

Sugarcane is approached as a resonant archive situated along a long continuum—from ancient foodways, medicinal uses, and ritual practices to contemporary regimes of industrial agriculture and monoculture. Deeply entangled with colonialism, slavery, migration, and global trade, sugarcane also sustains traditions of song, communal labour, cooking, and shared knowledge. The project holds these tensions together, attending to what persists, what is erased, and what is reactivated through collective practice.

Methodologically, Sugarcane Continuum mirrors the collective and time-sensitive nature of sugarcane cultivation itself. Research unfolds through archival work, site-based inquiry, fieldwork, cooking, listening, and conversation, with a focus on Durban and KwaZulu-Natal as sites where South African sugar histories are placed in dialogue with Egyptian contexts. This research time is treated as an open, invitational space—one that privileges gesture, performance, and hospitality as modes of knowing.

Across its forms, the project brings together poetry, commissioned writing, maps, games, and archival materials, activating reading, voicing, and listening as collective acts. Rather than producing a singular narrative, Sugarcane Continuum: Between Egypt and South Africa cultivates a shared research ecology rooted in embodiment, collectivity, and care, proposing sugarcane as a medium through which alternative methodologies and land-based knowledge can be reimagined.