Who Gets to Tell the Story? Reimagining Heritage Through Art and Exchange

1 and 3 September 2026

Heritage is often discussed as something fixed and finite: a collection of places, objects, traditions and histories handed down from one generation to the next. But bring artists, writers, performers and cultural practitioners into the same room and the idea becomes considerably less straightforward. A photograph can challenge an official account. A dance can carry a history that was never written down. A poem can give language to an experience that has been overlooked. A meal can carry the flavours, knowledge and practices of generations.

These were among the themes at the centre of the Heritage Narratives dialogue, a two-part programme presented by TEDxJohannesburg in collaboration with the Africa-Europe Partnerships for Culture (AEPC) in Johannesburg on 1 and 3 September 2026.

Rather than treating heritage as a subject belonging only to historians, archives or cultural institutions, the programme brought the conversation into the world of contemporary creative practice. Across the two events, artists and cultural practitioners considered the relationship between heritage, identity, history and representation, and the ways in which stories can shift when approached through different forms of expression.

The dialogue started with questions that have historically been posed and answered from a colonial perspective: whose stories are preserved, whose are forgotten, and what happens when the stories we inherit are told differently?

The partnership between TEDxJohannesburg and AEPC gave the question a particularly broad setting. TEDxJohannesburg's focus on ideas and public dialogue met AEPC's work in cultural cooperation, bringing together creatives, cultural practitioners and academics who approach heritage from different perspectives. The aim was to move away from linear narratives and instead explore heritage across performance, visual art, photography, poetry, film, sound and indigenous knowledge.

Where heritage lives
The first event, held at WeWork in Sandton on 1 September, approached heritage through culture, identity and artistic expression.
  Pitika Ntuli’s presence brought the weight of a long artistic and intellectual engagement with African history, identity and spirituality. His work has never sat comfortably within the idea that art exists separately from society; it speaks to questions of who people are, where they come from and how culture survives periods of profound political and social change.
  Greg Maqoma approached those questions through movement. As a dancer and choreographer, he has spent much of his career exploring African identity and contemporary life through the body. His contribution offered a reminder that cultural knowledge is not always something that can be placed on a page or inside an archive.

Sometimes it is carried through movement, gesture, rhythm, and performance. Nkhensani Mkhari and Chule the Love Activist brought the conversation closer to questions of indigenous knowledge, community and belonging. Their perspectives helped widen the idea of what counts as heritage, moving it beyond formal institutions and towards the knowledge and practices that exist within communities.

The range and diversity of the speaker panel, with each speaker serving as a custodian of knowledge rooted in African histories, gave the event its distinct character. Through their creative practices and perspective, they articulated the significance and power of creatives, shaping how we understand, preserve and engage with heritage.

At The Forge in Braamfontein, the conversation took another turn.

If the first event opened up the question of where heritage can be found, the second was interested in what happens when artists begin to question the stories they have inherited.

Looking again at the record
Thero Makepe was one of the speakers whose practice brought that question into focus. The Botswana-born photographer works with family histories, documentary photographs, archival material and staged images, often placing intimate stories alongside the larger political histories of Botswana and South Africa. His work We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here considers the experiences of his family in relation to migration, apartheid, political resistance and the history of the region.

What makes this approach compelling is the way Makepe moves between the personal and the historical. A family photograph is never simply a family photograph. It can become evidence of a particular time, place, or movement while also raising questions about what has been recorded, what has disappeared, and who gets to determine the meaning of an image.

It is the kind of work that asks the viewer to look again.

That approach fitted naturally into the Heritage Narratives conversation where the question was not simply how history is preserved but how it is represented and interpreted. Makepe’s photographs offer one way of showing how the past reaches the present through photographs, documents, stories and interpretations, all of which can be revisited.
Visual artist, Mncedi Madolo highlighted the significance of protecting and preserving African languages and how language is used in spaces of arts and culture, while Belita brought a poetic approach to the discussion.
Using a film and television lens, Desiree Markgraaff offered another perspective. Her work in the South African production industry, including her involvement with Shaka iLembe, speaks to the influence that visual storytelling has on public understanding of African history and culture.
A historical story reaching an audience through television is not simply being preserved; it is being interpreted through choices about characters, images, language and whose perspective is placed at the centre. Zviko Dryad approached the question through sound and music, adding another layer to the discussion about how cultural histories travel. Music can preserve traces of place and time, but it can also be sampled, reworked, and placed into new contexts. What is inherited can acquire new meanings as it moves between generations and settings.

The same idea was present in a more sensory way during the shared meal prepared by Exotically Divine Pulse. Many Indigenous African meals are largely plant-based, drawing on ingredients such as leafy greens, legumes, potatoes and grains. Building on these ingredients, the team prepared a vegan meal that introduced guests to the range of dishes and flavours that can be created from them.
The meal added another dimension to the conversation. Food carries knowledge too: of ingredients, preparation, cultivation, seasonality, and the ways communities have adapted what is available to create nourishing meals. In this context, the shared meal was not separate from the programme’s discussions about culture. It offered another way of experiencing it.

For AEPC and TEDxJohannesburg, bringing these different voices together was therefore about more than a conversation on heritage. It was about recognising the role of artists and cultural practitioners in shaping how societies understand themselves, not by replacing the past but by giving us new ways of looking at it.