
Margins For Error is a fringe cultural programme running from 8th to 17th November 2024 at Bertha House. This programme coincides with the 31st ILGA World Conference in Cape Town, marking the conference's return to South Africa, 25 years after its first gathered in Johannesburg in 1999.
Designed as a space for queer creators and activists, Margins For Error fosters generative conversations responding to cultural production within and for queer communities. The programme encourages engagement with queer experiences, ideas, and aspirations through diverse creative processes.
The title Margins For Error acknowledges the vital role of the experimental, unfinished, and uncharted processes when chasing dreams of freedom and equality. The impact of creative production in socio-political movements is difficult to measure, yet we know that it holds a profound, transcendent power to move, affect, and inspire across time, often in deeply personal and internal ways.
In quantitative research, accuracy is understood to be unattainable. Thus, the margin of error represents the range where the truth is predicted to lie. In queer organising, our freedoms are measured by the laws, policies, or societal structures that support equal rights, yet, we are often too aware that lived experiences rarely mirror the yardsticks. Margins For Error explores how cultural production could be the uncertain range that represent the "real" experiences of queer communities.
Through this programme, we hope to highlight the peripheral, often overlooked expressions, providing a a space in which queer individuals can find, remember, and recognise themselves. This reflection allows us to consider where we are and envision where we hope to be.
This event is free and open to anyone. Spaces are limited for each event, so registration will be required for each event.
Below is a provisional programme. Check back here, or on our socials for updates and more details about each event.

For any further enquiries, email: galaarchives@gmail.com

The ongoing activities of the programme are our pop-up bookshop (and reading room), a small gaming station and a a zine and placard-making station. It runs from 10h00 - 16h00 each day (except Sundays).
We have a small, and growing selection of queer publications. This includes zines, poetry and academic texts. Most of the publications are available for purchase, but everyone is invited to sit and read with us.
Bertha House has made part of their media lab available to us for those interested in exploring some free, queer games.
Material (paper, pens etc) for making zines and/or placards are laid out in the space, for anyone wanting to pull through for creative self-publishing or public messaging. Please bring some extra magazines, pamphlets, cardboard etc that can be shared with each other.
08 November (Friday)

Screening of the short documentaries, Aurora (dir. Carl Collison), Runway (dir. Zoey Black) and Salon Kewpie the Legacy Project 2023 (dir. Haneem Christian). The screening will be followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Khanyisile Phillips. The panellists are Aurora, Zoey Black and Cheshire Vineyard.
- 14h00. Bertha House Bioscope

Join us to celebrate the launch of Salon Kewpie’s first zine with readings, live performances, music, drinks, and more!
Limited edition copies of the 67-page zine, printed by @pulp.paperworks, will be available for purchase alongside other Kewpie Collection goodies, to raise money for our 2026 educational programme, Salon Kewpie: The Legacy Project.
Our dress code is A Night at the Bioscope: Legends, Statements, and Stars from Hollywood to District Six.
- 18h00. District Six Homecoming Centre
- RSVP
10 November (Saturday)

An intimate and sensual reading from contributors to the anthology, Touch. The writers, Kim Windvogel, Roche Kester and Tiffany Mugo will be in conversation with each other, and the audience.
- 12h00. Bertha House Library
- About the book: What comes to mind when you think about sex? Touch explores sex as a vast, yet intertwined experience with oneself and between people. It draws on the experiences of sex from people across genders, sexualities - even borders. It delves into the ways in which sex features in our lives. The pieces are real, cathartic and dare we say it, sexy.
11 November (Monday)

Zine-Making for Trans and Queer Liberation with Gabriel Hoosain Khan. A session to work individually and collectively, to use the process of zine-making as a space to dream and imagine alternatives to white, colonial, ableist, cis-heteropatriarchy. Material for zine-making will be provided. Bring extra magazines, pamphlets, posters etc. to share with each other.
- 13h00 - Bertha House Library
- RSVP through the general registration form

Join the Women’s Leadership Cantre (Namibia) for a screening of Una & Hatago. We will have a post film discussion with Nadia April and Toshi Haufiku.
- 17h00 - Bertha House Bioscope
- RSVP through the general registration form
- About the film: Uno & Hatago portrays the trauma and triumph of a young lesbian couple in Namibia as they challenge socio-cultural norms and overcome prejudice and violence in their quest to build the life and the country of their dreams. English and Otjiherero with subtitles.
12 November (Tuesday)

Queer History Walk and Community Reflection with Gabriel Khan
Hidden below the white sands og Blouberg strand and the cobbled streets of the Bo Kaap are herstories of queer and trans communities in Cape Town. Alongside these herstories, scholars and community organisations will share their insights into the contemporary struggles, resilience and resistance of the queer and trans community. This queer walking tour is orgsanised by the Office for Inclusivity and Change (OIC) and the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and the Centre for Art and Wellbeing at the University og Brighton.
- 10h30 - 13h30
- Meeting point: Hiddingh Hall Library (Michaelis School of Fine Art)
- RSVP through the general registration form

Screening of the art films: Kammakamma and Ridder Thirst (dir. Abri de Swardt), The Piano Room (dir. Bophelo Muhammed Morake) and World of Trophies (dir. Victoria Wigzell).
- 14h00. Bertha House Bioscope
- RSVP through the general registration form
About the Films:
The Piano Room: A man struggles with acknowledging or grappling with the idea of death and his death
World of Trophies: A film editor is left alone to piece together fragments of a story about trophies. Each fragment holds within it a reflection about struggle and victory, for which the trophy acts as simply a placeholder – an object that is both cheap, and light in comparison to the weight of what it represents. As the editor struggles to piece the story together, each reflection brings her closer to a reflection on her own life – drawing close the importance of family and the many forms it can take in the formation of a person’s sense of self.
Kammakamma: If the river’s mouth could speak, what would it say? Enacting the possibility of river mouths as storytellers and historiographers, ‘Kammakamma’ by Abri de Swardt is the opening episode of the second work in a moving-image trilogy that visually, archivally and sonically explores the Eerste River in South Africa as witness and carrier of submerged narratives. In the opening episode of ‘Kammakamma’ De Swardt probes one of the founding myths of Afrikanerdom through the figure of Hendrik Biebouw, a teenage idler. Biebouw is speculatively recast in a purgatorial state sifting sand from sandbags mined around the river mouth from the dunes in Macassar back into the river at the blocked confluence of the Eerste and Plankenbrug Rivers on the periphery of Stellenbosch, as a ghost wading in a feedback loop.
Ridder Thirst: 'Ridder Thirst’ explores the agency and limits of queer youth during Fallism, the transformative political movement that emerged in the wake of South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall protests of 2015. The video interrogates how white supremacy is expressed through, and attenuated by, the Eersterivier (Afrikaans for ‘First River’). De Swardt foregrounds the river as witness of extreme social discrepancies by moving from its mouth at the former separate amenity of Macassar Beach to Stellenbosch, the affluent university town originally set aside for colonial settlers quitting the Dutch East India Company at the first river after Cape Town. Photographs of Afrikaner student couples captured at the river during apartheid by Alice Mertens, a Namibian-German ethnographic photographer who was the first tertiary tutor of the lens in South Africa, are called into question through anti-monumental gestures, motion-tracked cut-outs, and dense voice-over narration.
13 November (Wednesday)

The Poetry Install - the state of being installed. Spaces that exhibit poetry and spaces that exit poetry. A 4-person live poetry installation that explores the space where poetry crosses over the margins into the uncomfortable and the unconventional.
Reflections and Rewriting: A Panel with the featured writers Zizipho Bam (curator), Jerome Coetzee, Sanelisiwe Myaba and Langalibalele Mngadi
- 15h00 - Poetry Installation
- 17h30 - Panel discussion
- Bertha House Bioscope
- RSVP through the general registration form
Communal Canvas with Langalibalele Mngadi. The multimedia canvas project embodies participatory and collaborative storytelling, inviting participants to contribute magazine images, words, and symbols that reflect themes of queer liberation and connection. Through selecting resonant images, participants create a vibrant collage that merges personal narratives into a shared visual landscape. Ultimately, the canvas transforms into a living story, where individual contributions come together to explore freedom and identity collectively
Questions with Jerome Coetzee: Questions invite participants to sit with Jerome across a table and answer some questions. The purpose of this durational piece is to look within.
Prompts and Poems with Zizipho Bam. An improv poetry writing exercise with participants who wish to take part. This collective writing exercise is a means to engage in a space that lets poets in and sits with it amongst strangers.
The Pot of Pap at the End of the Rainbow with Sanelisiwe Myaba. A creative potluck that explores the future of food. What we exchange and sacrifice today for a tomorrow that is food secure and full with rich history. What words do we create, what words do we erase for the poetry to live to tell the story.
Reflections and Rewriting: A Panel with Writers Zizipho Bam, Jerome Coetzee, Sanelisiwe Myaba and Langalibalele Mngadi. Once the installation is done, we will share poems and talk about this experience of being within the exhibition and exhibiting this work. We move through space as we unpack the realities of living and creating inside and outside the margins.

Short documentary film screening and discussion of, The First: A short film by Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Nairobi, Kenya. Post-film discussion with the director, Sulah Mawejje (online), Masi Zhakata and B Camminga
- 14h00. Bertha House Bioscope
- RSVP through the general registration form