Advertisement
Join us at the BGI, 3 MacDonald Crescent, on Thursday 19th February from 6pm -8pm to welcome South African Hip Hop and spoken word practitioner Jitsvinger to Wellington.Jitsvinger arrives in Aotearoa New
Zealand this February with a new EP that deepens his language-driven exploration of identity,power, and cultural memory, released ahead of his upcoming Wellington-based residency.
Rooted in the linguistic and musical traditions of Cape Town, the EP moves between Afrikaans, Kaaps, and English, using rhythm and spoken word to interrogate whose voices are heard and
how history lives insidelanguage.
Politically alert without being prescriptive, the work is grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction, and driven by the immediacy of performance. The EP is accompanied by album artwork that functions as a form of visual therapy rather than illustration. Drawn from the lyrics, lifestyle, and lived reality that shape the music, the imagery is deliberately open-ended, designed to ease the mind, evoke emotion, and invite reflection rather
than prescribe meaning. Symbols recur throughout the artwork: a chain that may suggest captivity, hierarchy, or inherited histories of enslavement; a pair of eyes that could read as a mirror, or as an all-seeing presence; and a drum that beats to its own rhythm, perhaps a heartbeat,
perhaps a vibration. References to the Cape Flats sit alongside masks and forms of armour,signalling protection, survival, and self-fashioning.
Like the music itself, the artwork carries
flow, rhythm, punchlines, and metaphor, but ultimately resists closure. Meaning is left to theviewer. The listener becomes the interpreter.
Jitsvinger’s New Zealand residency (17 February–4 March 2026), in association with The Performance Arcade, will be based in Wellington and includes performances, workshops, collaborations, and institutional engagements. The residency places a South African language
practice into direct conversation with Aotearoa New Zealand’s contemporary cultural landscape, where questions of Indigenous language revitalisation, belonging, and post-colonial identity are
central to public life.
Rather than a conventional international tour, the residency is structured as a working exchange. Jitsvinger will engage with artists, students, and communities through live performance, participatory sessions, and education-focused workshops, testing how a Cape Town–rooted practice translates, shifts, and responds within another Indigenous-led context.
The residency will be documented as a short film, tracing the creative process and the tensionsand connections that emerge when language, rhythm, and place meet across the Global South.
With the new EP serving as both entry point and provocation, Jitsvinger brings a practice deeply embedded in local language and history into dialogue with Aotearoa New Zealand audiences at a
moment when the politics of voice, land, and cultural continuity are sharply in focus.
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
BGI (Wellington Boys' and Girls' Institute), 3 Macdonald Cres, Te Aro,Wellington, New Zealand
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
