Under the creative direction and curation of Adrian ‘Diff’ van Wyk and Pieter Odendaal, InZync is a longstanding social impact initiative affiliated to the SU English Department, funded in part by our students’ English Society.
InZync is a registered non-profit organisation dedicated to the expansion of multilingual and multimodal poetry platforms in the Cape region. Members of InZync have been sponsored to travel to Brazil, Holland and England, to suss out the poetry scenes, and participate in youth-based cultural events such as the artist networking session at the Roundhouse Theatre. InZync is in the process of establishing further collaborative travelling projects around the globe, with possibilities in Amsterdam and Brazil for 2018.
InZync has also hosted numerous local and international poets, both page and performance specialists. Koleka Putuma, for example, author of 2017’s smash hit collection Collective Amnesia (uHlanga) rose to prominence through her InZync performances.
Current InZync projects include:
- work with Joburg-based ZAPP poetry and colleagues from Wits University on the ways in which poetry education can be transformed through an understanding of performance poetry as indigenous knowledge system, funded by the National Research Foundation. The immediate goal is a series of learner and teacher workshops for 2018, and the writing of a co-authored article.
- ConVerse, a multilingual poetry translation anthology translating contemporary young poets in Xhosa, Tswana, English and Afrikaans into all four languages;
- the Cape Town Poetry Slam, a regional slam initiated in 2017 in partnership with the Open Book Festival (the next slam will run in August/September 2018)
- the INkredibles, a youth poetry collective based around weekly poetry creation workshops for previously marginalised school-going poets from the Stellenbosch area.
More information about InZync can be found on its Facebook page. InZync’s work is also explored in Pieter Odendaal’s MA thesis, “The Place Where Poetries Meet: exploring the contribution of the InZync poetry sessions to sociocultural transformation in Stellenbosch” on the SUNScholar Research Repository.