Conversations on Creativity: Inside the Cape Town Launch of Weaving Stories

On November 1, inside the neoclassical walls of 6 Spin Street, something quietly powerful unfolded. Weaving Stories—PICHA’s global storytelling initiative made its Cape Town debut in partnership with the visionary collective Creative Nestlings. What emerged was less a traditional book launch and more a concentrated exchange of ideas: a room full of photographers, designers, publishers, and writers mapping the future of creative work across the continent and beyond.

The evening’s panel—Josiane Faubert, founder of PICHA; photographers Kat Grudko and Barbra Guya and art professional Mikhaillia Petersen did what great conversations do: they dismantled the veneer of the creative industries and spoke plainly about what it takes to build a life in them.

They asked the questions creatives navigate daily:
How do you price your work with confidence and fairness?
What does sustainable creative labor look like in an economy built on uncertainty?
How do we document the communities we love without flattening them for commercial use?

The answers were layered, honest, and rooted in lived experience. The audience, many of whom lingered long after the panel didn’t simply observe. They engaged, interrogated, challenged, and ultimately affirmed one another. It was, in every sense, a gathering of peers.

Books were purchased and signed. Strategies were exchanged. PICHA tees were picked up. Weaving Stories bracelets found new wrists. And beyond those gestures, something more enduring emerged: a shared understanding that creative infrastructure isn’t built in boardrooms or policy frameworks, it’s built in rooms like this one, by communities willing to invest in each other’s futures.

Cape Town showed up with tenderness and curiosity. And as the conversations spilled out into the city’s cool night air, one idea remained unmistakably clear:

This is what creative infrastructure looks like: collaborative, deeply human, and built from the ground up.

For those who couldn’t join us in Cape Town, Weaving Stories remains open to you.
This book and the community around it is an invitation.