Vrouevissers – Narrations with the West Coast of South Africa

Initiated by LIGHT PLACE, Vrouevissers is a practice-based research project that combines collage, oral history and cultural mapping to surface and make visible the histories, intangible heritage and solidarity networks that have developed over generations amongst women fishers on the West Coast of South Africa. Vrouevissers is being developed in partnership with five women from the Mamre Small Scale Fisher Cooperative, located an hour outside of Cape Town on the West Coast in the Western Cape.

An important focus of the project is to surface valuable insights into how women fishers have adapted indigenous knowledge systems to remedy negative environmental, economic and socio-cultural realities and maintain livelihoods from the sea. Vrouevissers explores multiple ways in which these stories can be archived and mobilised for long term impact.