Exhibition Lines of Survival
Details
- Date:
Sep 17, 2026 - End Date:
Nov 01, 2026 - Time:
- - Location:
Lines of Survival: Living, Adapting, Imagining Tomorrow
The 2026 Africa Soft Power Storytelling Fellowship & Photo Essay Prize Exhibition
Presented by The Africa Center in partnership with Africa Soft Power
September 17, 2026 – November 1, 2026
Free and open to the public. No prior registration required.
What does it mean to live, adapt, and imagine tomorrow when the world around you is changing?
Across Africa, climate change is reshaping landscapes, livelihoods, and the everyday decisions people make to survive. Yet these experiences cannot be reduced to a single image or story.
Lines of Survival: Living, Adapting, Imagining Tomorrow brings together the work of the winner and finalists of the 2026 Africa Soft Power Climate Change Storytelling Fellowship & Photo Essay prize, an initiative supporting a new generation of African and diaspora visual storytellers.
The exhibition presents five distinct perspectives on life in a changing climate:
In Soweto, South Africa, Mpumelelo Buthelezi's winning essay, E’Plazini: A Place to Call Home for Waste Collectors, turns its attention to waste collectors who comb the city to collect recyclable materials. They sell these materials, simultaneously diverting waste from landfill while creating livelihoods within the informal economy.
At Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, Vanessa Mulondo's The Fisherman's Tale documents a community adapting its traditional fishing practices as seasons and water levels become increasingly unpredictable.
Kevin Ochieng Onyango's Climate Realities follows the ingenuity and adaptation of people living through Kenya's prolonged drought, while Brian Ongoro's When The Water Stays documents the resilience of communities facing recurring flooding in Kisumu County.
Along the coast of Togo, Nicolas Vava's Stand in the Sand traces the effects of coastal erosion on communities whose homes and livelihoods are increasingly shaped by the advancing sea.
Together, these works move beyond climate crises as an abstract global challenge. They bring us closer to the people, communities and knowledge systems already responding to its consequences.
Featured artists
Mpumelelo Buthelezi | South Africa
Vanessa Mulondo | Uganda
Kevin Ochieng | Kenya
Brian Ongoro | Kenya
Nicolas Vava | Togo
About
The Africa Soft Power Climate Storytelling Fellowship & Photo Essay Prize supports young African and diaspora photographers aged 18–30 to document the realities of climate change and the ingenuity, adaptation and resilience emerging in response.
Through powerful visual storytelling, the programme brings African perspectives into global conversations on climate, energy and development, while inspiring greater understanding and action.
The 2026 edition, themed Lines of Survival: Living, adapting, imagining tomorrow, explores how people live with climate pressure, the resourceful ways communities are adapting, and how imagination can shape more resilient futures. At a moment when adaptation, resilience, energy access and the financing of climate solutions are moving to the centre of global debate, the perspectives of the communities experiencing these shifts most directly remain too often absent. Learn more about Africa Soft Power.