2nd Floor, 138 Jan Smuts Avenue Parkwood Johannesburg South Africa, 2000
Johannesburg: 26.2041° S, 28.0473° E London: 51.5072° N, 0.1276°
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“My practice is often looking to amplify, sharpen, and highlight aspects of the built environment that are overlooked in finding and "visibilising" archives (and their potential futures) in places that fall outside of the dominant tradition and canon.”
— Sumayya Vally
The first volume, Reckoning With An Entangled World, grapples with the reflexive relationships of extraction, ruination and reverberation, working towards solidarity across places and perspectives. Together, the essays, conversations and artworks included here map new landscapes, producing images of liminal times and spaces that provide a critical opportunity to reassess diverse relationships to the world. Queer and decolonial methods are approached as explicit tools of disorientation, questioning the clarity of time and space that arises from a Western cis-heteronormative and imperial context. Rather than a field guide, this book proposes a constellation of material – a horizontal network made of various perspectives which together may point in new directions.
With a contibution by Sociologist Denise L. Lim and architect Sumayya Vally speaking across their disciplines and subjectivities as women of colour with transnational heritage and intersectional identities. Through dialogue with each other, they consider how their research in African cities informs their understanding and reinvention of social architectural practice—a conversation that builds on Lim’s writing on Ponte Tower in Johannesburg, and Vally’s work on the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion.
