Expired March 27, 2023 6:59 AM
Already unlocked? for access

Virtual tickets are pay-what-you-can, $5–25. Click "Unlock Now" above to select the price you are most comfortable with.


To accommodate evolving public health recommendations regarding COVID-19, ByDesign 2023 will be held both virtually and in-person. VIRTUAL, IN-PERSON, and HYBRID Festival Passes are available here.


These imaginative, lovingly crafted shorts take on the POV of objects, materials, and edifices around us, imbuing them with hopes and regrets, dreams and purpose.

In Chorus, fiction lends to architecture an alternative retelling. Taking as its site a modernist Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) in South Africa, the imagined narrative augments the otherworldly qualities of the structure and its landscape, abstracting it from historical specificity to offer new considerations. It recalls how the many voices of a congregation became autonomous from the bodies that housed them, occupying the building with their song. Sound becomes synonym for spectre; the voice recast as ghost. Ecstatic femme voices lead the dissent, accumulating in the upper reaches of the spire. By their haunting, the sopranos make apparent the hidden and disavowed alive within the space, resisting the ideologies that shaped it.

  • Year
    2021
  • Runtime
    7 minutes
  • Language
    English
  • Country
    South Africa
  • Director
    Meghan Ho-Tong, Lucienne Bestall, Matty Roodt