Cape Town Fringe, Manenberg Avenue Is Where It’s At is not a detached document of a place viewed from a distance. It is the result of prolonged presence, listening, return and exposure to lives shaped by forced removals, structural violence and the everyday negotiations of survival in Manenberg.

The voices that run through this work are not illustrative captions. They are testimonies. Raw, unfiltered and often contradictory, they speak of labour and retrenchment, housing and eviction, faith and despair, motherhood and loss, loyalty and betrayal. They speak of the long afterlife of apartheid and the slow violence of its spatial legacy, where poverty, gang culture and fear are not accidents but conditions produced over decades. These are lives lived under constant pressure, where the ordinary act of going to work or sending a child to school carries risk and where grief is both private and communal.

Lurie began working in Manenberg at the end of 2001, originally intending the project as a continuation of Life in the Liberated Zone. Instead, the work took on its own weight and urgency. Over roughly eighteen months, he spent extended periods in and around Manenberg Avenue, photographing and engaging with residents who welcomed him into their homes and daily routines. What emerged was not a single narrative but a dense accumulation of stories, gestures and moments that resist simplification.

The photographs are inseparable from the spoken words that accompany them. Together, they reveal how history embeds itself in bodies, homes and relationships. The accounts of forced removals from Cape Town, the rupture of community and the relocation to what many describe as “concentration camps” underline how displacement fractured social structures and left spaces vulnerable to violence. At the same time, the work refuses to strip its subjects of agency. It shows resilience, humour, moral complexity and a fierce insistence on being seen and heard.

Lurie does not present Manenberg as an anomaly. He situates it within a broader South African reality, shaped by policy, neglect and unfulfilled political promises. The testimonies challenge easy narratives of crime and culpability, insisting instead on work, dignity and opportunity as the foundations of any meaningful change. As one voice repeatedly returns to, work is not only economic survival, it is the basis for safety, self-worth and social cohesion.

Cape Town Fringe, Manenberg Avenue Is Where It’s At is both a photographic essay and a historical record. It asks the reader and viewer to sit with discomfort, to confront the continuity between past and present and to acknowledge lives that have too often been reduced to statistics or stereotypes. It is a work grounded in proximity and responsibility, shaped by the understanding that to look is not enough. One must also listen.