After Library III_SWEET WATER

The After Library will assemble a rehearsal of live reading, wearing, and sonic work, its clothes and the texts that birthed them coming into conversation with one another through an ad-hoc assembly of audience-participants. With reading direction from Thuli, and sonic accompaniments and interventions by Tlotliso, the rehearsal centres on ideas extracted from their reading of Patric Tariq Mellet's The Lie of 1652: A decolonised history of land. This reading will be placed in dialogue with several other extracts and impressions from After Library books that move across time, space, and genre. Each text is both read and 'worn' (via its accompanying garment), bringing work from Southern African queer fiction to revolutionary speeches, black theology and niche sporting histories, into an embodied dialogue, held together loosely by a script — or score.

About the After Library

The After Library (2025–) is a tiny, experimental library of clothes and books, blending collective reading with speculative design and the wear of clothing, initiated by Thulile Gamedze and here in collaboration with Tlotliso Skefu. The Library's garments are designed and produced in response to texts chosen by friends, and then the garment-book combos are loaned out for short periods to a small but growing network of friends and collaborators (and their friends and collaborators, etc). The After Library’s purpose is for its materials to be worn and read, and to document these loaning processes as social histories of wear, embodied and dialogic reading experiences — and stylish moments.

The After Library is part of TOOLSHED, a residency and research initiative by Kunstinstituut Melly exploring the tools we use today to build, question, and transform cultural institutions.