Counterspace

Exhibition: Liminal Identities in the Global South, JCAF 2021 Graham Foundation Grant recipient: Amaxiwa | Embodied Archives Serpentine Pavilion 11 Jun — 17 Oct 2021 TIME100 Next List honoree, Sumayya Vally

“If shelter is the most basic unit of architecture, then safety, belonging and the idea of home are at the core of humanity’s impulse to build.”

Serpentine have teamed up with Dezeen to livestream a conversation between Sumayya Vally, and Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist live in conversation.

Searching for design expression for the continent through design research, publishing, pedagogy, built things, buildings and other forms of architecture.

project BackStory
project An Inventory for Feminist Upheaval – A film and manifesto
writing Choreography of a Procession
writing Soils, Walls, and their Funambulists
writing A Blurry Line on the Plan
writing A letter to a young architect

Notes towards a soft manifesto:

  1. Traditionally, the role of architecture has been to confine or control space, shaping social experience and relations through static forms. Our architectural vocabulary and forms largely belong to a past era of static space and have not hybridized or morphed to accommodate and inspire changing spatial conditions, to include the shifting, fluid, and amorphous digital, or the history of peoples for whom movement, not stasis, is the predominant experience.
  2. Design expressions for identity and political freedoms and of the digital commons dance allegorically alongside each other. The digital commons holds possibilities for finding architectures for both migration and subverting control, forms of representation alongside themes of diaspora and hybridity, and all that which is fluid, shifting, undefined, continuously redefining, evolving, and mutating.
  3. The relationship between our experiences, our mental images and our physical existences are never settled; all of these continuously form, inform and undo each other. There is no truly objective way of seeing.
  4. Translating modes of discourse –  encountered “friction”, the aesthetics of absence.
  5. We need to supplement our inventory of design language to include new ways of seeing.
  6. Make the most of very little – of being able to piece together ideas from leftovers, fragments, and to speculate with what we have around us. I want my work to embody its place.
  7. Look so deeply at what is present that you notice the absences too.
  8. Looking for design waiting to happen.