As A Cultural Producer
An overview of the platforms and practices through which ByLwansta curates live music, preserves visual culture, and contributes to the living archive of South Africa’s alternative music ecosystem.
Your Weekly Touch Up
Live Music Curation & Cultural Programming
Your Weekly Touch Up is a long-running weekly live music platform dedicated to nurturing South Africa’s alternative and independent music ecosystem through performance, conversation, and community. More than an event series, it functions as a cultural incubator, offering artists consistent stage access, audience development, and critical dialogue around the realities of building sustainable creative careers.
As a cultural producer, ByLwansta is deeply embedded in every layer of the platform’s conception and execution.
He operates as part of the curatorial and talent-booking team, researching, selecting, and booking artists weekly, with careful attention paid to artistic diversity, genre fluidity, and the development of emerging voices alongside established acts. This process is informed by close listening, community awareness, and a long-term view of the local music ecosystem rather than short-term programming.
In his role as creative director and multimedia designer, he is responsible for the platform’s visual language across posters, social media assets, and merchandise. This includes translating the ethos of each edition into a coherent visual system that respects both the artist being featured and the broader identity of Touch Up as a cultural platform. Design is treated as an extension of the music, not a marketing afterthought.
Your Weekly Touch Up also functions as a site of knowledge exchange. ByLwansta facilitates and hosts panel discussions that unpack the lived realities of artists and creative practitioners, covering topics such as touring logistics, funding, branding, intellectual property, and sustainability. In this role, he curates conversations, moderates dialogue, and ensures that information shared is practical, accessible, and grounded in experience.
Beyond the stage, he serves as event host, anchoring each night, guiding audiences through performances and discussions, and holding the energy of the room with intention and care.
Digitally, he manages social media strategy, content publishing, and community engagement, ensuring that Touch Up exists as an ongoing conversation rather than a once-off weekly occurrence. This includes audience interaction, artist amplification, documentation, and maintaining a sense of continuity and belonging within the Touch Up community.
Through this multi-layered involvement, Your Weekly Touch Up becomes an act of cultural production, creating space, memory, and momentum for artists, while also serving as a living archive of Johannesburg’s alternative music culture in motion.
eyewaslistening
Cultural Archiving & Visual Research
eyewaslistening is a digital archive and research-driven platform dedicated to documenting, preserving, and contextualising South African music cover art. It treats album and single artwork not as supplementary visuals, but as critical cultural artefacts, visual records of sound, identity, and historical moment.
At its core, eyewaslistening is an exercise in cultural preservation through design literacy.
ByLwansta leads the platform as a researcher and curator, undertaking detailed investigation into cover artworks, their creators, and the broader visual languages they belong to. This includes studying the stylistic approaches of designers and photographers, tracing visual lineages, and situating each artwork within its musical and cultural context. The curation process involves extensive searching, cross-referencing, and intentional selection to ensure that the archive reflects both depth and diversity.
As creative director and multimedia designer, he developed the visual identity of eyewaslistening, from its logo and typographic system to its social media templates and presentation style. The design approach is intentionally restrained, allowing the artwork itself to remain central while providing a consistent, recognisable framework that signals archival care and respect.
He also fulfils the role of communications administrator, personally reaching out to cover art creators, photographers, illustrators, and designers to credit their work accurately, request permissions, and open lines of dialogue. This process restores authorship to creators who are often overlooked in music discourse, reinforcing the platform’s ethics of acknowledgement and visibility.
Digitally, he manages social media publishing, audience engagement, and community interaction, fostering a space where artists, designers, and listeners can exchange knowledge, references, and appreciation. Over time, this has allowed eyewaslistening to grow beyond a feed into a shared cultural resource.
Through its slow, consistent cadence, eyewaslistening functions as a living archive, preserving visual histories that might otherwise be lost to algorithmic timelines, while educating audiences on the role of design in how music is experienced, remembered, and valued.