Stellenbosch offers a compelling case study of how South African cities continue to negotiate the afterlives of segregation within their everyday geographies. Beneath its postcard image of vineyards and oak-lined avenues lies a dense network of labour, tenancy, and informal exchange that sustains the town’s functioning. The project emerges from this terrain of uneven development, where the flows of work, care, and migration continuously redraw the boundaries of neighbourhood and belonging.

The research focuses on domestic and urban thresholds as contact zones, spaces where inherited divisions are inhabited, negotiated, and occasionally transgressed. These encounters unfold within a landscape whose patterns of proximity and exclusion have been shaped over generations and continue to structure daily life. Across rented backrooms and self-built extensions, material traces of adaptation and resilience emerge; spare rooms converted into workshops, yards shared among families, and dwellings extended through collective labour. Such improvisations speak to the shifting conditions of survival, revealing how acts of repair, exchange, and cohabitation generate alternative economies and sustain networks of care and social connection amid precarity.

Photographic practice becomes a means of registering these negotiations. Through sustained engagement with residents and their environments, Arbeidslus attends to the subtle gestures that hold domestic life together: washing strung between walls, corridors repurposed for rest, and gardens cultivated as acts of care. These images and fragments form part of a living archive that traces how broader forces, from policy and capital to embedded historical trauma, are absorbed and reconfigured in ordinary spaces.

Organised as a botanical atlas, the project uses suburb and street names, many drawn from indigenous and alien flora, as chapter markers that weave together taxonomy, spatial history, and image. The title, Arbeidslus, derived from Afrikaans and translated as “labour desire” or “work eagerness,” evokes the deep entanglement of labour, place, and identity that continues to shape the area. By mapping parts of Stellenbosch in this way, the work situates the town as a lens through which to reflect on the broader urban interregnum, a moment when older spatial orders give way and new, uneven forms of collective life are being forged.