‘Seeing power’, co-creation and intersectionality in film-making by Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba

In this chapter, our focus is on the methodologies developed with the young co-creators of Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba and their reflections on stories, power, and meaning making. We offer a critical consideration of co-production in the context of GCRF-funded research led by two forms of representation: participatory filmmaking and performance. The chapter introduces the project and builds a methodology of intersectionality and ‘seeing power’. By attending to its importance in pedagogies and participatory processes, we offer reflections on how lived experience, conditions, and dynamics come to the fore in the process, and how these young people make sense of power. We consider regimes of power related to funding, legacies of dispossession, and ongoing peripheralisation, while at the same time highlight the achievements of young people’s participation in formulating the stories of their worlds. We provide close engagement with the processes of training, partnership-building, and forging creative campaigns with the newly formed co-creator collective whose ethnographic films and performance contribute to voicing issues related to land, stewardship, and futures.