Hello,

Welcome to the website of francis burger

I’m an artist, facilitator, designer and publisher based in Johannesburg

I work with people to facilitate expression, improvisation, play, and reflection

I map conversations, associations, trails of thought, histories, and places

I design publications, websites, and processes

I make things with clay, fabric, ink, and paper

I draw, and create illustrations

You can get in touch with me on fmburger [at] gmail [dot] com or here, follow me on instagram @francis.m.burger, or visit me by appointment at my studio in Johannesburg.

Scroll down for a few recent and in-progress projects

Recent-ish

Facilitation, printing and design of Pulses, songs, silences: What am I hearing?, 2025. 60p booklet created through a workshop at the Wits School of Arts & around Johannesburg for one part of an interdisciplinary exchange between the Wits School of Arts (Department of Fine Arts and School of Architecture and Planning) in Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London. “Attendant to the city's elusive and fragmentary ontologies, the sonic became a way to ‘listen the city into being’ through sound drives, cave recordings, river sound walks, elevator journeys with binaural microphones. Anchored in the elemental materials of water, rock, brick (soil), and air (sky), the collaboration brought together alumni, academics and artists to reflect on the ecologies of space, sound, and writing”. With Polly Gould, Zen Marie, Jhono Bennett, Brigitta Stone-Johnson, Bettina Malcomess (coordinators and contributors) Merijn Royaards, Letlhohonolo Ntsewa, Refiloe Namisa, Pebofatso Mokoena, Muhammad Dawjee (contributors). Made possible by: UCL–Wits University Strategic Partner Funds 2024/25 Grant.Printed at the Wits School of the Arts with the RISO SF5030 – jointly acquired by Keleketla! Library & the Johannesburg Working Group of the Another Roadmap for Arts Education Africa Cluster (ARAC), with additional facilities by the Department of Fine Art, Wits School of Arts. View the publication & associated process materials.

Facilitation and design of Where is the Wild?, a week-long workshop co-facilitated with Simamkele Sitwebile, and organised by Renée Holleman, with students from Silikamva, Salt River & Harold Cressy, hosted by Lalela at Zeitz MOCAA, with walks and drawing sessions at the 2 Rivers Urban Park & the Liesbeeck River parkway, Cape Town. 24-28 March 2025.

“In our Where is the Wild? workshop, we collaborated with a group of Lalela high school learners on a journey of discovery to explore what we mean when talk about ‘Nature’. What kinds of wildness could we find in some of Cape Town’s in between spaces? And how we might discover this wildness within ourselves, at the messy juncture between co-existence and alienation, working across binaries, and embracing hybridity. In line with the emergent properties of a wildness that we can’t always anticipate, we embraced playful and experimental drawing activities, in the studio and in the field, as a way of thinking through different kinds of relationality and reciprocity — between people in pairs, between things, and between people and things in various situations” (Renée Holleman, Where is the Wild?, 2025).

Immersive Sky Experience Experimental website development for Paribartana Mohanty’s ISE database and website, a multi-layered, digital, sky-scape composed from cropped images from the artists’ Environmental Disaster Image Archive and poetic AI interpretation. View the ISE website, or the overview guide. Built with assistance from Theron Burger <3

Oriole Press, launch of experimental artists imprint, and the release of Drawing is Still Writing, writing and drawings by Nyakallo Maleke, Meteorites, with poems by Lavendhri Arumugam and an essay and illustrations by myself, co-published with edition~verso, Johannesburg, Light Passes, written by and co-published with Gretchen Blegen, Addressed to its Intended, with Erin Honeycutt & Cutt Press, Berlin. See more at oriolepress.xyz

Milisuthando, graphic design and visuals for the film Milisuthando, directed by Milisuthando Bongela, edited by Hankyeol Lee and produced by Marion Isaacs; including the creation of a school diary for Milisuthando (the film’s director and narrator), a collaborative poster design, photographed by Hankyeol Lee; and typeface design after the letter ‘Tears are worthless’, written by Reginald B. Leslie Moloisie in 1953. 2023. For more, see milisuthando.com.

in a time of... co-design and facilitation with Rangoato Hlasane, experiments in print and collective publishing with third year Drawing & Contemporary Practice course at Wits University – students negotiated working in self-formed collectives – collectives included Hoops, T.S.C (The Struggle Continues), Outcast, Phetoho(?), Paperjam, ZAR, Terms & Conditions, and Move – and explored print technologies alongside processes of anarchiving and process-based making. Co-ordinated by Rangoato Hlasane of Wits University and Keleketla! media arts project. Above images show student works by Hoops, T.S.C, and Paperjam. 2023.

offset design and facilitation of ‘Offset, experiments in print and collective publishing’ for a third year Design & Drawing course at Wits University – students negotiated working in self-formed collectives, and explored print technologies alongside processes of anarchiving and process-based making. With guest facilitation by INVADE (Omphemetse Ramatlhatse, Nyakallo Phamuli and Queenzela Mokoena), and Victoria Wigzell of Pulp Paperworks. Collectives included The Strip Club, Fiction, Collective Individuality, Seriously Playful, No Name, Together, Veto, B&D, Memory Lane and Labyrinth. Offset followed in the footsteps of annual collective publishing courses instituted by Rangoato Hlasane of Keleketla! media arts project, and was co-ordinated by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Bettina Malcomess. 2022.

the clubhouse - Collaborative & explorative arts-based learning space with the Shade Youth Arts group in Brixton, Johannesburg; co-facilitated with Tamzyn Botha (Shade founder), Camille Behrens, Faswillah Nattabi, Lucy Mpofu, Gavaza Mthombeni and others. 2022-2023.

Papertrails - Interactive exhibition and creative library that animates a selection of books, newsletters and other materials drawn from the Independent Publishing Project (IPP) - a temporary library of self-published and small scale publications from South Africa, organised in 2011 & 2012 with Jonah Sack. Papertrails engages a selection of publications from this collection alongside Sean O’Toole’s Photo Book! Photo-Book! Photobook! Produced with Jonah Sack with the participation of Sven Glietenberg & Lavendhri Arumugam, A4 team & the Lalela project. A4 Arts Foundation 12 February - 30 April 2022. Image: Detail of Moon Sun, Andrew Putter, Published under Table Mountain, Terror Firma 1991 & colourful cut-outs from workshops & work-in-progress in the Papertrails space.

View the Lalela x Papertrails x A4 boekies.

AnotherKind - editing and website design for AnotherKind - a creative lab hosted in Cape Town in 2021, where a group of South African artists visualised and adapted a script originally intended as a live theatre production. The site performs fragments from the artists’ process, including film, collage, sound experiments, and reflections. 2021.

Visit the AnotherKind website.

MuseumFutures publication and website design, facilitation of ‘clippings, clusters & stubs’as part of an anarchiving process for the MuseumFutures project - a pan-African, people-centred cultural project that works with museums across the continent to explore new formats of African museology. With study groups from Musée Théodore Monod IFAN Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Musée National Guinee, National Museums of Kenya, Steve Biko Foundation, Uganda Museum, Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art and the Goethe Insitut. 2021.

Click to view the MuseumFutures website + digital publication.

Proximal/Distal Publication design & (an)archiving for a collaborative project organised by joining room (Bettina Malcomess) and supported by Pro-Helvetia. Proximal/Distal ‘brings together a network of geographically dispersed sound practitioners, artists and researchers for a series of digital relays [and] passes...’ (Image right: Screenshot from a zoom conversation with multi-disciplinary composer Nandele Maguni for Proximal/Distal; image left: Screenshot of publication pages with work by Simnikiwe Buhlungu). 2020-21.

Watch a small clipping from the anarchive here; listen to Nandele Maguni’s mix of the Proximal Distal double-vinyl on Oroko Radio; read more about the project (via Pro-Helvetia)

mvuso arts & drama club arts & applied drama explorations with a small group of young people from Jeppestown, Troyeville and Bez Valley. Weekly sessions between December 2020 and April 2021 were co-facilitated with Sven Glietenberg and mentored by Khathala Nkomo as part of the Drama for Life Mvuso School and Community Education Project, University of the Witwatersrand. Hosted at the Troyeville House and Victoria Yards. 2020-21.

processing_process (#unleash) explorative course for the School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics at the University of Cape Town’s 1st year Bachelor of Architecture Studies) co-facilitated with dr. heeten bhagat & Kyle Morland at A4 Arts Foundation. (Image: Zoe Foale, BAS student, submission for Creative Reflection 9 ‘Stretch’, 2020). Website editing and design for student works. 2020.

View project & presentation material.