GSA Unit 18: Hyperreal Prototypes 2020 & 2021: Spectral Hauntings & Supersurfaces by GSAUnit18

Prototypes Graduate School Of Architecture University Of Johannesburg

Supersurfaces: Surfaces, Skins and Screens in Johannesburg and Durban

Spectral Hauntings: Spaces of the Hyperreal in Post-Colonial Egypt

Hyperreal

UNIT18

Spectral Hauntings Spaces of the Hyperreal in Post-Colonial Egypt

Supersurfaces

Surfaces, Skins and Screens in Johannesburg and Durban

To our students and collaborators

www.gsaunit18.com GSA Unit 18 The Graduate School of Architecture Faculty of Arts and Design University of Johannesburg www.gsa.ac.za

GSA Unit 18: Hyperreal Prototypes 2020 & 2021 Edited by Naadira Patel, Sarah de Villiers and Huda Tayob Johannesburg, 2021 Copyright (c) 2021 the University of Johannesburg, Graduate School of Architecture. ISBN: 978-0-86970-820-0 978-0-86970-821-7

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Cover Design: Naadira Patel/studiostudioworkwork Design and layout: Sarah De Villiers and Naadira Patel Proofreading: Dee Marco Printing: Four Colour Print Paper: Munken Pure 240gsm & 90gsm

Contents 15

Introduction -------------------------------------------------------------

Archiving Anticolonialism in Egypt Sara Salem

I Want to Claim the Right to Look Endriana Audisho

Prototyping New Possibilities: Digital Architectures for the Preservation of African Cultural Heritage Denise Lim ---------------------------------------------------------------

other-wheres and otherwhens

Virtual Sitings through Dialogues with Dust, Egypt Files and Recipes for an Atmosphere

Ghost Sitings

Durban

18+ Series ___________

PART 1: Work of 2020 - Spectral Hauntings Knowledge Systems, Truth, Narrative

Surveillance Prototypes Leo Chicwambi

Mnemonic Devices: Exposing the Margin Within Institutional Spaces Of Power In Post-Apartheid South Africa Nothando Lunga

A Video Game to Operate the Form-Less Hyperobjects that Have Shaped the Giza Plateau for Millennia Izak Potgieter

Hyperreal Perspicuities: Multi-Narrative Reconstructions of Modern Egypt Kamal Ranchod

The Many Sides of The Square Fathima Mula

The Transformation of Tradition Gila Abrams

Engravings and Stitches: Tactical Mapping Against the Oppressions at the Rafah Border Atiyyah Ameen --------------------------------------------------------------Home, Belonging

104

The Unhomely Prototype: The ‘Seraglio’ and the Unsettling of Amina Karabo Moumakwe

114

Home Making: An Anthology of Hyperreal Cooking Preserves Gloria Pavita

122

Homemade Prototypes: De-constructing Domestic Decorum Zahraa Essa

130

Nubian Holding Patterns: Prototypes of Spatial Resilience Jessica Cristovao --------------------------------------------------------------Othering, Heterogeneities

140

The Black Female Return Siwelile Mathenjwa

148

Cairo’s Safe Sanctuary Mpho Molaoa

154

Industrialisation of the Home: Tools, Waste and Circularity in the Zabbaleen Community in Cairo Meghana Patel

162

The Hybridized Home: Unveiling in Cairo’s Necropolis Natalie Harper --------------------------------------------------------------Power and political regime

170

Nocturnal Heterotopias: Prototyping the Event Place for Otherness Thelma Ndebele

178

Ghost Stories, Hauntings and Afterlives Of The Suez Canal In Egypt Jana Crous _____________________________________

186 PART 2: Work of 2021 - Supersurfaces Heterotopia, Fantasy, Playspace, Copies, Worlds-In-Worlds 190

Contradictory Co-Equals: Virtual Heterotopia Demi Bridgland

198

The Plasticene: New Beachfront Supersurfaces of Reintegrated Waste Fragments Meghana Patel

206

The View Within: The Window as a Frame for Exposing Surveillance Architectures Within the Home Fathima Mula Legality, Thresholds Surveillance Veiling, Agency, Boundaries

214

Hyper-Unveiling: Unmasking the Agency of the Veil in Public Spaces Atiyyah Ameen

220

Surveillance Supersurfaces: An Exposure and Repositioning of Power of Surveillance in Space Gila Abrams

228

Sonic Supersurfaces: Spatial and Legal Thresholds to Noise and Silence Ivan Meyer Bodies, Landscapes, Territories, Toxicity, Residues

237

Imbokodo, Unina Siwelile Mathenjwa

244

Ecological Devices:Cyborg Contaminant Assemblages Held in Black Bodies and Black Landscapes Mpho Molaoa

252

Omissive Architect[ures]:Exposing the illusion of gentrification in PostApartheid South Africa Sharmaine Mango

258

Kwachekeka: Terraforms of the Black Surface Simphiwe Mlambo

264

Unveiling the Surface of Memory Ntokomalo Mzoneli Images, Screens, False Realities, Consumption, Influence, Desire

272

Surfaces of Hyper-Influence In Consumerism: from the Physical to The Virtual Realm Mutaleni ya Toivo

278

Digital Rule Book: Images of False Realities Tania Verburg

284

Unmasking KFC: Investigating Speculative Realities Liam Wepener

290

Without Origin: A Gallery of Simulacrum Thembalihle Basi

296

Productive Surfaces Ashendran Kuppan ____________

302 Acknowledgements 304 Figures List

ab s o lu te / a fterlife / alien / ances a p par i t ion / arch aeo lo g y / ar tif icia bon a f ide / b o rder / cer tain / chan / c o p y / c o u n ter fe i t / cut / cyborg / deep past / de linea te / dependen d is p lace / do u ble / djinn / dual / ech / e x ten sion / e xtrareal / extra te rre / f a t i g u e / f i ght / fold / forerunn ha u n t / h idden / hybr id / hyperrea ma g ic al / m a k e / mass-authentic / / m o de l / m u tation / mythologica / o r i gin al / p lace-h o lder / parallel p hantom / pion eers / p laceh o lde r / / pre s e r v e / pr osthetic / prototype rem a k e / re p lica / retell / revenan / shadow / s pe ctre / sti tch / stol su pe r n a tu r al / sur face / surreal / tran s cen den tal / transfer / twin /

stral / an te ce dents / anticolony / al / a u t hen t ic / ava tar / b elonging / nge / c o lon y / c ommon / convincing g / dar k c on s e r va tion / descendant nc y / der ivat iv e / detach / d issent / ho / em b al m / empi re / exper im ent es t r i al / f ac sim i le / fa ke / fam i li al ners / fu tu re / genuine / ghost / al / im a ge / k e p t / limb / lineage / / m e ta s ta s is / m icrocosm / m i rror al / na tu r al / o cc ult / offshoot / old l / par ano r m al / parent / pa ttern / plan etary / possession / po st-fa ke e / re al / re i te r a te / relationship / nt / r i tu al / r o b o t / root / satelli te len / s upe r f lu o u s / superhum an / / sur v e i llan ce / t hreshold / trace / / unce r ta in / u n ear thly / unmake

Introduction: other-wheres and other-whens

Huda Tayob, Sarah de Villiers and Naadira Patel

Unit18: Hyperreal Prototypes

are moving faster than ever. Political dissent,

two years of Unit 18 student work as a series

wars and economic crashes rise and fall with a

of interrelated counterparts in dialogue with

planetary crunching of time and space, across

collaborators. The student work is foregrounded

media and image. We are at once hurtling

with essays by esteemed writers and Unit

forward and yet also falling behind constantly,

18 reviewers and collaborators, Sara Salem,

out of step and out of time. This post-modern,

Endriana Audisho and Denise Lim, who situate

late-capitalist, post-colonial, and neo-colonial

the work within wider and broader discourses

world represses and projects its ghosts and

of Sociology, Technology and the Arts. As a

phantoms with similar intensities, if not entirely in the same forms as older worlds before. We

years of generous yet critical conversations

live with the horrors and nightmares of past-

and insightful collaborations, all of which have

violences, struggles for liberation, dreams

informed an index and constellation of work

of freedom and hopes of future worlds yet

that loops, overlaps and weaves through

to come. The hyperreal and supernatural

resonating areas of fascination amongst a group

are indistinguishable from the real and the

of curious researchers and designers.

authentic.

----

The unit adopted the prototype as a central

Unit 18 takes on the haunting presence of power through the ‘Hyperreal Prototype’. In the age of the 4th Industrial Revolution, things

mechanism to engage with the hyperreal, with an emphasis on time-based architectures. We collectively ask whether past remnants or future imaginaries might augment and alter our

Introduction: Other-wheres and Other-whens

reading(s) of and interventions into the present.

past and future in the now, reveals hierarchies

We recognise that ‘Architecture’ has thrived on

of power at play, in both narratives of history,

the presence of the ghostly prototype: from

and means of representation. Ways of seeing,

phantom cities to model cities, prototypes that

archiving and drawing carry their own inherent

were never built, to mass-produced, globalised

power structures, and students follow traces,

models. The architectural prototype is the

marks and leftover remnants from other times

ideal example, perfect copy, dream that was never built, tool of the revolution yet to come,

inheritances. The work created in response,

sign of a lost civilisation, simulacra and seat of

suggests a series of !"#$%&'#$%$( and !"#$%&

power. Yet, the line between the model and the

'#$)(, at once immanent and possible.

real, pharaoh and robot, authentic and copy is blurred and haunted by history. In Unit 18 we take on the messy history of the prototype to engage with devices sited between the real towards other worlds that ‘might still be possible’. Students experiment with prototypical iterations of drawing instruments, large scale and virtual worldings. We adopt, adapt and deliberately glitch the prototype as a means to build embodied interventions, a layering of time and undisciplined use of tools.

Outside of this Unit, the Unit Leaders each hold a strong interest in curatorial practice and interdisciplinary intersections. The interest in ‘ways of seeing’ is interrogated through drawing and making, alongside theory, text, performance as a space to test the edges and margins of architecture, pulling in various methods and means in order to situate architectural production as spatial practice, within wider knowledge systems. Student work is layered with constellations that each, in their own right, makes a critical and creative claim on

---Spectral haunting is a central frame from where to engage with the remnants and latent forms of both power and resistance. For Avery Gordon (2008), haunting is a means to recognise that which lurks beneath the surface, enabling a move towards “a countermemory for the future” (Gordon 2008, 22). In the unit, embodied drawings and prototypical models disturb, make leaky, loop and entangle seemingly singular accounts of history. The process of engaging with haunting, as a presence of the

propositional vessel takes the form of a new or altered imagined building, spatial complex, or surface through which to navigate ways of being otherwise. ---Part One, Spectral Hauntings, includes the work of 17 students from the 2020 cohort. Spectral Hauntings engages with Egypt and Johannesburg as central sites of study. Unable to travel in 2020 due to the global pandemic, we shifted the program to study Egypt virtually,

drawing on the work of various practitioners,

cyborgian amalgamations of past and present,

artists, writers and architects either based in or

copied styles or aesthetics from elsewhere and

with connections to Egypt. Through Dialogues

that which attempts to replicate the other-

with Dust

where in the here, or the other-when, in the

marathon in April 2020, we asked how we might

now. Sometimes, the surface presents as an

engage meaningfully with a place, at a distance. 2020 was framed by the importance of deep

times and places, and sometimes, there is a

histories, marginalised narratives and minor archives, as a platform from which to build,

and design studio has thought about the

imagine and dream alternative futures. The

surface, forms of surfacing and re-surfacing

student work digs through messy palimpsests

in relation to historical trauma, that which is

of ancient, colonial and neo-colonial pasts,

revenant, which returns, to haunt, to repeat.

alongside collective and personal stories of

It considers traces, and that which refuses to

haunted place and space across the African

be erased. Extending the idea of surface as

continent. Students drew on minor archives,

site from the physical to the virtual, the work

social and popular media, remnants of

has also looked at technology, screens and

documents and maps, and buildings as vessels

our hyper-real existences and digital identities. Similar to the word ‘archive’, ‘surface’ is both

how we see and how we draw, experimenting

noun and verb: a physical site, and an action.

with means and methods of presenting

For us, reality, authenticity and truth are

alternative, messy and entangled drawings,

elements with ties to the physical world, but are also enacted and manipulated by perspective

The work ultimately engages with alternative

and the way in which things are seen or told.

epistemological framings, and forgotten pasts,

Students deploy explorations of surface as noun

as the grounds for !"#$% futures.

and verb, to locate sites of interest, to represent

Part Two, Supersurfaces, covers the work of 16 students in 2021, with 7 of these being returning students from 2020. In the second year of Unit18 we challenged the idea of a singular site by claiming (*%+,-$.,(.(/"$. Among others, Durban and Johannesburg are framed for research. Continuing with an investigation of the hyperreal and the haunted, we framed our facades, replications, copies and originals,

and to articulate spatial experience in order to ‘surface’ propositions of other&'#$%$( and other-'#$)(. ---The students of Unit18 have been brave, experimental and imaginative in their work. Tutors and students have collectively attempted architecture as a discipline, to read, to listen, to watch, to learn from entangled spaces and

Introduction: Other-wheres and Other-whens

sources, to not take knowledge and practice for granted, to think critically about the spaces we inhabit, and to ask what pasts need addressing in the present. We appreciate the courage, determination and trust that we ask of our students does not come lightly, and is incredibly precious to us, and so we thank our counterparts and collaborators in this ambitious project. We look forward to future collaborations and conversations, with everwidening curiosity in the years that follow. ---Keywords: 01$"$%!"!2/,3.4,)",(53.67,5(2,-$3.8!2/$(3. 9!%7:(&;)&9!%7:(<=.0>$?,7/"53.@#%$(#!7:(. A*%B$/77,)-$.C$/7/)?3.D?$)-53.E!*):,%/$(<=.0E!:/$(3. >,):(-,2$(3.@$%%/"!%/$(3.@!F/-/"53.G$(/:*$(<=. 0;H,?$(3.A-%$$)(3.4,7($.G$,7/"/$(3.8!)(*H2"/!)3. ;)+7*$)-$3.I$(/%$<=.0J)!'7$:?$.A5("$H(3.@%*"#3. K,%%,"/B$<=.01!H$3.E$7!)?/)?<=..0L"#$%/)?3.D"."#$. M,%?/)(3.D?,/)("."#$.8$)"%$<=06!'$%.,):.6!7/"/-,7. G$?/H$<N

> Gordon, A.F., 2008. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press,

—Avery Gordon1

—Jacques Derrida2

1.Gordon, A.F., 2008. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 2. Derrida, J., 1994. Specters of Marx. Routledge, 46

Archiving Anticolonialism in Egypt Sara Salem I Anticolonialism changed the world, even while it did not bring into being an entirely new one. The anticolonial moment of the 20th century was momentous: animated by hope and optimism, pulsing with dreams and destinations, and dreaming of decolonial futures. Although often told and retold through the lens of anticolonial nationalism and postcolonial state projects, anticolonialism went beyond these categories, dreaming of entire lifeworlds that into states. The anticolonial moment was a moment of rupture; an opening in world politics. Everything was, for an instant, melting into air. Yet we do need to continue to contend with the coming together of the radical dreams of anticolonialism and the more conservative form of the postcolonial state.3 I wonder if we can understand this coming together as something

that haunts the present, as representative of a moment during which alternatives were crushed under the weight of the alternative? In this possibilities for Egypt through asking whether the future that came to be was the only possible one and, whether we can understand this as a moment that haunts the present. Hyperreal Prototypes notes that Egypt continues to haunt architectural production in the replicas of pyramids, sphinxes and obelisks that were transported and rebuilt worldwide. Indeed, I Egyptian obelisk on a walk in London, suddenly feeling a strange sense of being out of place (both with regards to myself and the obelisk). Kamal Ranchod’s work discusses other sites of colonial and modern haunting, including the Battle of Navarino, The Bombardment of Alexandria and the 1952 Cairo Fire, resulting in a stunning piece entitled The Parade of Phantoms and Fathima Mula explore contemporary Egypt’s

3. For recent work in this vein, see: Sharma, N., 2020. Home Rule: national sovereignty and the separation of natives and migrants. Duke University Press; Getachew, A., 2019. Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination. Princeton University Press.

Archiving Anti-colonialism in Egypt

isolated from ‘the only game in town’ and space. And Karabo Moumakwe’s work takes

forced to lead a ‘double life’ that destroyed

us back in time to explore Naguib Mahfouz’s

both their integrity and ‘their ability to

Palace Walk, and how female embodiment in patriarchal space haunts our experiences today. Other work done by Unit 18 looks to the Suez Canal, Nubian displacement, the City of the Dead, and labour in the home to think about haunting. In my own work on Egypt’s moment of

Through a careful—or perhaps it was less planned than we think—cultivation of state and military power which included the removal of threats to the Nasserist vision, Abdel Nasser’s project became the alternative to British colonialism and a dependent monarchy. Around

decolonisation I have spent much time thinking and writing about Gamal Abdel Nasser,

that I refer to here as the Nasserist project.

anticolonial resistance, and Egypt’s postcolonial

This project was a combination of the radical

state, and I wonder if in some sense this space

energies of various social movements that

is another one in which Egypt haunts us, this

predated the 1952 revolution on the one hand,

time not in terms of architectural production

as well as the ideological and material changes

but rather in relation to political life in the

put in place by Abdel Nasser and the Free

Middle East and North Africa. In her memoir, Arwa Salih—an Egyptian communist active in the 1970s—uses the term stillborn to describe how her generation of Egyptian leftists related to the Nasserist project, nonetheless haunts the present: I felt profoundly disconnected from the ‘national struggle’ that haunts every was a historical necessity for liberation-era communists were hopelessly trapped in the logic of anti-imperial national populism,

historical moment, that of decolonization. Its mobilization of anticolonial nationalism and independent, state-led industrialization mirrored a broader trend across the postcolonial world that saw the dependency of former colonies on the metropole as a major challenge to meaningful independence. Yet, this was a project that reproduced capitalism rather than abandoning it, and that relied on the strengthening of the nation state and sovereignty in ways that ultimately did not redistribute wealth.

4. Salih, A., 2017. The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt. Seagull Books.

If, as Derrida says in the epigraph above,

us, and around us. It is present in the way

haunting belongs to the structure of every

we arrange time and the past, in the way we

hegemony, then what does this mean in relation

narrate nationalism, and in the way we tell family

to Abdel Nasser and Egypt? The Nasserist

histories. If we could speak of an anticolonial

project in anticolonial Egypt can be said to

archive, it would mean an archive that is

haunt both through its ultimate coming apart

expansive, slippery, invisible, and uncontainable

and its failure to bring about an anticolonial future; it also haunts us through these very

archive is one made up of that which we

promises it made, and through the anticolonial future it imagined, spoke of, and yet that never

hopes, burning desires, ghosts, spectres, and

came into being. It is perhaps this—the fact that it never came into being—that produces some form of hope in the present. Might we understand Nasserism as a complicated failure that alludes, however faintly, to the possibility of other words, perhaps can we also understand Nasserism as a promise whose articulation— even decades later—might disrupt the present?

Perhaps here we might parse apart history and memory, and ask whether anticolonial pasts are really absent from both. On the one hand, I think they are certainly missing from many historical narratives. When thinking about the in relation to decolonisation in Egypt, I think of Omnia El Shakry’s piece on the lost archives of both Arab Marxism and decolonisation more

What might all of this mean for the way we approach history and the archive from the vantage point of anticolonialism in spaces like Egypt? It might suggest that we need to move

broadly, as well as the destroyed state archives of the 1950s and 1960s.6 In that moment archives were destroyed, lost and so much was never archived at all. How might we write and

beyond thinking of ‘archive’ in the singular,

think about a moment like this?

and open our eyes to the many archives all

On the other hand, this absence is not as

around us. Anticolonialism lives with us, within

pronounced in the space of memory. As far

5. See: el-Malik, S.S. and Kamola, I.A. eds., 2017. Politics of African Anticolonial Archive. Rowman & Littlefield. 6. El Shakry, O., 2015. “History without documents”: the vexed archives of decolonization in the Middle East. The American Historical Review, 120(3), pp.920-934.

Archiving Anti-colonialism in Egypt

back as I can remember, my sister and I heard stories about Gamal Abdel Nasser, about

was imagined to represent. Al-Rashoud notes

independence, about Suez, about the Palestine

that the image of Abdel Nasser was a symbol

War and the creation of Israel, about the

onto which millions of people projected their

building of the Aswan Dam and the tripartite

hopes and dreams; it stood in for a shared

attack, about more and more people going to

consciousness of what the future could and

school and university. The 1950s and 1960s

should be: “it can safely be said that no secular

were like a living memory in our home, kept alive through these stories and through my

region before or since.” Could we think of these images—whether in the form of photographs

photographs, old newspapers, postcards, letters, and more, each item adding detail and

government spaces—as part of an anticolonial

texture to a narrative that was still largely

archive? I wonder if it is in spaces such as this—of

So much of my own work has been nurtured

memory or faded images around us—as well as

by coming back to these stories and to the

other spaces of the anticolonial archive, that we

fragmented picture they created of Egyptian decolonisation and the decades that came

been. What haunts us is not just what happened

after. These stories created a set of feelings that

during those decades—including forms of social

ended up being the starting point of so much

and political violence we continue to live with—

of my writing. Not only did these stories create

but also what did not happen, what could not

visual and sound textures, they also captured

happen, and what people wished had happened

the momentousness of those political events

instead. Perhaps part of an anticolonial archive

and what they meant to everyday Egyptians.

is the practice of imagination, of speculation,

In a recent piece for Mada Masr,7 Talal alRashoud writes about the old photographs and images of Abdel Nasser around the Gulf, , and the history they allude to. Like many other parts in Bahrain during those decades, transcending “political doctrine to become a broad cultural phenomenon in the Gulf.” What is of interest

and of hope. Haunting itself is an acutely express—or to archive. It captures so beautifully the way in which we might feel the past in the present. It also gestures to something unresolved, repressed, hidden, and out of sight. Feeling our way through past and present—and future—might open up ways of seeing a world full of anticolonial memories.

7. al-Rashoud, T. 2008. Icon of defiance and hope: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s image in Gulf history.[O]. Available at https://www.madamasr.com/. Visited January 2020.

I Want to Claim the Right to Look Endriana Audisho The practice of 7!!O/)? today has to be

and systemically silenced histories. Understood

reconceptualized. It needs to dismantle the

through the lens of countervisuality,1 which

models of vision that set up surveillance and

refers to using tactics to dismantle the visual

panoptic machines as early as plantation

strategies of the hegemonic system, the right to

slavery, through imperialism and the military-

look has political and social agency.

industrial complexes still present today. Turning to our troubled times, looking has to occupy the realm of confrontation – the intersection to look directly at the privileged, the dominant narratives that have ruled a certain “history,” white masculinity and toxicity, enablers of colonial violence, and in turn, claim political subjectivity and collectively. To look is to confront authority and render visible the very

If a right to look is a claim to a right to the real (and its reshaping),2 the ability to look, confront and therefore, access the real has recently been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic. interior, conceal our faces with masks, socially distance through 1.5 metre intervals, and the the risk of transmission, has displaced us not only physically but also visually.3 The spatial regulations imposed through the pandemic

1. See Jan Baetens, Review of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Leonardo 46, no. 1 (2013): 95-95. muse.jhu.edu/article/493132: “Countervisuality, then, is not just a different way of seeing or a different way of looking at images but the tactics to dismantle the visual strategies of the hegemonic system.” 2. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory Of Visuality, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): “I want to claim the right to look… The right to look claims autonomy from this authority, refuses to be segregated, and spontaneously invents new forms… The right to look is, then, the claim to a right to the real. It is the boundary of visuality, the place where such codes of separation encounter a grammar of nonviolence- meaning the refusal to segregate – as a collective form.” 3. It is important to note that the ability to self-isolate at home, socially distance and have access to masks are privileges in themselves, afforded to too few.

I Want to Claim the Right to Look

have exacerbated visuality’s primary domain,

representation as it substitutes signs of the real for the real, while representation assumes

(COVID-19 positive + / negative – as well as

We have been substituting signs of the real measures and travel restrictions), echo sovereign

for the real via our screens. The “grid view” on

and colonial forms of power and control.

Zoom reproduces a sense of collectively, the

Furthermore, with international travel near

“breakout room” emulates a smaller, more

impossible and the gaze turned to our interiors,

private conversation, the “virtual background”

the right to look or the right to be seen, is

option allows us to virtually travel to a desired location, and the “touch up my appearance”

look and confront, is hard to imagine as the

reproducing a smoother complexion, minus the strenuous morning beauty regime. We’ve become

authority versus the controlled, both physically and visually.

lost in a copy of the real. It is only when the virtual background glitches

As millions of people have been forced to stay

and does not blend with your real background,

home, the pandemic has seen the gaze turn

which happens to expose the large pile of

to our interiors, and our relationship with

washing on your unmade bed and not the

the exterior is now primarily mediated by the

skyline of New York, that we are reminded that

multi-frame Zoom interface and daily news

we have been living in a world of simulation

reports on our screens. We know this is not

during the pandemic. More commonly, the virtual background chews up a part of the body making

spatial regulation has been imposed onto a

the corporeal almost invisible. The interactions

population. However, the occurrence of a way

via our screen through Zoom are somewhat

of living, directed by the interior, crossed with

cinematic and theatrical in nature – video on, we

social connection and interaction, mediated by

watch each other whilst also being conscious

predecessors as it has constructed a paradigm

we are prompted or raise our hand to interject.

of simulation. Simulation is to be understood in Baudrillardian terms as the inability to distinguish

a screen) and homogenous (the corporeal

reality from its representation, in that the copy

has been reduced to a series of identical

4. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

environment that has turned its head away from

The global circulation of media across screens dismantled hegemonic accounts of the region

from. If a right to look is to confront authority and

and saw the urban citizen exercise the right to look and be seen.

exactly looking at on the screen. How does one practice the right to look and confront when all we are seeing are a series of cropped frames of bodies and simulated interiors? Our screens have kept us connected during the pandemic but have also kept us distanced from the real.

Although traumatic in nature, these mediatised - What are we bringing into the comfort of our interiors? Who is the audience? How can we use the screen to expand discourse on reality versus the simulated real? What is being simulated?

But as history has presented us, the screen is far from neutral nor should simply be seen as a

screen, multi-screen, as seen in the video art

communication device. Screens present material

and information installations of the mid-1960s and 1970s,7 to dismantling traditional forms

experience and perception of space. The Vietnam visual thinkers and designers, operate within our “the brutality of war into the comfort of the living

complex contemporary mediascape and create

room.”5 CNN’s live coverage of the Gulf War, the

an alternative paradigm of representation in which pressing issues can be publicly circulated?

screen materialize the city of Baghdad through

Although the pandemic has challenged the

the language of pixels and resolution. Veiling the

practice of looking, where mediation via the

city with a grainy phosphor-green night-vision

screen is foregrounded and the relationship between closeness and distance is blurred, this 6

is also an opportunity to reconceptualise what it means to look today. For a visually literate

and its simulated representation of the city.

generation, who have lived in a world of screens

More recently, the use of social media during

saturated with images, this should not be hard. to look.

and disseminated counter-narratives of the protest via the screens of their personal devices.

5. Marshall McLuhan, Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975 6. William Finnegan, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker (January 28, 1991), 21. 7. Namely the screen-based projects of Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham and Charles and Ray Eames, among others.

Prototyping New Possibilities: Digital Architectures for the Preservation of African Cultural Heritage

Prototyping New Possibilities: Digital Architectures for the Preservation of African Cultural Heritage Dr. Denise L. Lim

Unit 18 is centred around the theme of

North American and European metropoles

hyperreal prototypes—a topic of profound relevance given that many of us live in societies

ideology of modernity promotes progress

implicated in the

and advancement, failing to acknowledge

spheres of colonialism,

modernity, and capitalism.

implies

what it actually costs—the displacement and

excess—that which goes above and beyond

oppression of those branded marginal and

far outlive the initial iteration. Colonisation

same normative ideals—where the vocabulary

was not merely a synchronic event describing the establishment of European control over

‘underdeveloped’—is haphazardly used to

indigenous populations. The industrialisation

entrench countries in an uneven system of

and urbanisation of the Witwatersrand was a direct result of colonial settlement, extraction, and expansion. Apartheid governance was a form of hypercoloniality that still resonates today—albeit sometimes invisible, ephemeral, or ghostly. One sees its excesses in the form of neo-liberal rule, where the power of

But in a sea of hyperrealities gone wrong, prototyping is a method and practice with the potential to imagine far more hopeful possibilities into being. In this impressive catalogue of projects produced by the

students of Unit 18, there is a new generation

minds of those haunted by histories embroiled

of architects who are unapologetic in their

in asymmetrical power relations.

gall to reimagine African architecture. These projects are more than a temporary ‘fail safe’ designed to replace the physical exhibition experience for students, lecturers, and external examiners alike. These digital prototypes make theory and praxis, but to digital humanities and cultural heritage. Each project proposes new possibilities for the role architecture can play in expanding the cultural archive. As Roopika Risam argues, the importance of a postcolonial intervention in digital humanities praxis at the intersection of digital technologies

Though Nubia never existed as a modern nation-state, it once encompassed the regions Aswan in southern Egypt, and at the juncture of the Blue and White Niles south of Khartoum in Sudan. As one of the earliest civilisations of ancient Africa, it lasted from around 2500 B.C.E. Thutmose I in 1500 B.C.E. Northern Nubia was annexed to Egypt by the third century A.C.E., but a strong sense of place and identity is preserved in the lived traditions, ceremonies, and rituals of the Nubian diaspora spread throughout Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya. Cristovao’s explores the more recent

databases, and other digital objects that actively resist inscriptions of colonialism and neocolonialism.”1 Three student projects that stand out as exemplars of these principles include that of Jessica Cristovao’s

history of Egyptian Nubians who were displaced after the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1964. As Cristovao herself articulates, “this project constructs prototypes of spatial resilience as ways of seeing and remembering…. it reveals hidden and forgotten patterns of an endangered culture.”2

Kamal Ranchod’s and Thelma

Cristovao created drawings and illustrations

. Each not only

the ceremonial practices of Nubian women,

Ndebele’s demonstrate how systems of power are architected in material structures, but how these architectures pervade in the hearts and

for an imaginary storybook that visually traces exploring how contemporary domestic space can be re-adapted to provide cultural continuity for that which was woefully lost or fading.

1. Risam, Roopkia. 2018. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 4. 2. Cristovao, Jessica. 2020. “Nubian Holding Patterns.” GSA Unit 18: Hyperreal Prototypes. Retrieved January 25, 2021 (https://www.gsaunit18.com/students-work/Nubian-Holding-Patterns).

Prototyping New Possibilities: Digital Architectures for the Preservation of African Cultural Heritage

Dividing the Nubian tale into several chapters,

representations. His stereographic projections

Cristovao reimagines events, people, and

draw attention to the limitations of a single

sites as literary characters. The Aswan High

subjectivity and instead explores multiple

Dam is the antagonist or ‘killer,’ the Nubian

positionalities and perspectives with great

community as the hapless victim or ‘the killed,’

sophistication and skill.

and the temple of Abu Simbel is ‘the resistor.’ Though Abu Simbel was built in lower Nubia, it was constructed to epitomise the power and conquest of Egypt. Cristovao refashions the temple into an architectural counterfactual—a truly Nubian space designed to prioritise women’s everyday needs. Digital renderings not only allowed Cristovao to pay homage to neglected stories and livelihoods, but emplaced Nubian women at the centre of the story. Where a gendered spatial reality was missing, this digital project provides a far more inclusive narrative.

In one scene, users view the monument and surrounding buildings from the street level, moving both vertically or horizontally. From this vantage point, the renderings create the illusion that British, French, and Russian ships second stereographic projection, the user sees the same event from the perspective of a fallen naval soldier submerged in the ocean, lost in explosive debris. When looking up, the debris appears to move toward you. When looking down, the debris moves away. It depicts time as a thermodynamic law—a physical property

By contrast, Kamal Ranchod’s project explores

that one can witness propelling forward or

modern Egyptian history of the nineteenth and

backwards in motion. The third projection

twentieth centuries during the Muhammad Ali

depicts the bombardment of Alexandria, where

dynasty when the British occupied Egypt and struck a deal to jointly rule Sudan. In Ranchod’s , representational

fort, while another angle displays ships attacking it. In

, this 360-degree video

prototypes such as drawing, digital stitching,

demonstrates what decolonial praxis looks

augmentation, and immersive 360-degree

like using a cinematic combination of sound

video are used to capture and overlay multiple

engineering, architectural drawing, and three-

points of spacetime at a single site. Three

dimensional modelling. Ranchod’s ‘performative

major historical events that took place at the

cartographies’ demonstrate how digital tools

Alexandria Naval Unknown Soldier Memorial are

not only make the tricky politics of representing

explored—the Battle of Navarino in 1827, the

marginalised people and histories a viable

Bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, and the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. Where Eurocentric

the myopic narratives of colonial antagonists. complicates the way

grand master narrative, Ranchod challenges

history is normatively remembered and re-

this by embracing complexity in his diachronic

enacted.

But the methodology of immersive experience

developing a separate ontological status of another. The digital has become hyperreal—a

. Her project explores

mode of experience, knowledge, and practice that can feel ‘more real’ than the evasive physical

LGBTQIA+ communities. Though the tendency

world. As digital modes of living, working, and

in South Africa is to focus merely on those

being have become an indelible part of everyday

racially othered, Ndebele expands the

life, these projects hold substantial implications for preserving the peri-tangible remnants of

intersectional identities—people of colour who

African cultural heritage, practice, and place-

transgress heteronormative notions of identity.

making. Though students in Unit 18 could

Ndebele digitally models a performance venue

not travel to Egypt this past term due to the current pandemic, these projects attest to the

subculture. She expands grammars of

Simone references in his scholarship on South

architecture to include the design of light,

African urbanism. In the face of adversity lies

sound, and embodied movement. African

the ability to improvise, adapt and create. The architectural prototype draws upon the power

archaeological artifacts or written records of a

of imagination to revitalise the lived experiences

distant or recent past—Ndebele’s work proves

of those who are prone to loss, deterioration

that embedded in contemporary practice are

and obsolescence. These digital architectures

new ways of expressing and indexing the self.

provide inclusive modes of representing and

The sonic landscapes of musical subcultures

constructing a truly decolonial future.

add an oft-neglected sensorial mode of knowledge production. Ndebele’s project has the forethought to use multimedia methods of documentation to archive complex cultural practices and preserve them in multi-sensory formats. In the grammar of postmodernism, hyperreality ontological in nature. The former philosophises on the characteristics of reality and why a particular reality exists; the latter contemplates whether something exists at all. Digital modes of socialisation and representation concurrently

otherwheres

otherwhens

Virtual 'Sitings' through Dialogues with Dust, Egypt Files and Recipes for an Atmosphere

Poster artwork by Fred Swart © Graduate School of Architecture, UJ.

In some of its earliest formations, Unit 18

became a metaphor through which to

sought to address ideas of fast-proliferating

read and follow the resonance of the virus,

spatial change, particularly in African cities. Across time zones and from various forms fascinatingly from an ever wider and far-

of isolation, the presentations and dialogues

contemporary re-hauntings of the project of

with dust we might attend to experiences,

roots in our cities. Divergent to this, we also see practices reintegrating earlier colonial vessels, and vice versa.

exclusions, exhaustions, and invisibilities around the globe in this uncertain time. Students, architects, activists, and researchers generously shared fragments of their lives from South Africa, Cape Verde,

But as a very new project, Unit 18 was to face

Egypt, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Italy,

almost immediately, in February 2020, an

Sweden, Turkey, the UK, and the USA.

unanticipated rate and scale of change of how

— Huda Tayob and Sarah de Villiers,

we understand space through the event of the

@#$.A/"$.M,?,P/)$, 2020.

COVID-19 pandemic. States of the marginalised, isolated and also the ‘close-together’ assumed, at that moment, an unprecedented and distinct focus. The project of Dialogues with Dust became a fast-reacting, ambitious tool for us to

Continuing an endeavour to virtually ‘follow this dust’ from our home-bound positions, we also developed ‘Egypt Files’, a postcard archive of contemporary artists, stories, messages, sites and ways of working that resonated with

On the 2nd of April 2020, Unit 18 and Unit 13, two design research groups at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), University of Johannesburg, hosted a Dust. Initially organized as a twelve-hour trips to Egypt (Unit 18, which we led) and Namibia (Unit 13, led by Claudia Morgado

our research frame from Cairo, Alexandria, and other places of interest, mostly in close proximity to the Nile. Additionally, ‘Recipes for an Atmosphere’, a studio brief posed in April 2020, asked our students to understand ‘site’ as an action of siting and situating one’s project and oneself, but also ‘sighting’ - considering the special ways of seeing space or narrating it. Students were to collect various ‘site

and Eric Wright) it emerged as a rapidly

ingredients’ or constituents, some atmospheric,

provisional and embedded sense of global

They were also invited to incorporate methods

fragility across borders and regimes of

and inclusive of sounds, textures, and smells. of assembling or collating these through interesting practices to produce assemblages

conditions of site in dusty places developed

of place and situation. These were to be drawn from Dialogues with Dust, or elsewhere

through dust and its attendant hauntings,

through adjacent separate research. Together,

displacements, and atmospheres. Dust

we ‘haunted’ various sites across Egypt and

particles—airborne, mobile carriers of

Johannesburg together, and the sites, in turn,

environmental and geological code—

haunted us.

Above (top): Excerpt from Tova Lubinsky (2020) 'The Media War in Architecture'. Above:

Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen

(2020) 'The Beam, the Air and the Speck'.

Left: Excerpt from Elke Krasny (2020) 'Architecture and Urbanism

for a Broken

Planet'. Above: Excerpt from Naadira Patel

(2020) 'New Content Available'.

Above: Excerpt from Egypt Files, collated and archived by Adam Osman in GSA Unit 18. Below: Screenshot from

Sara Salem's presentation 'Haunted Histories and Decolonial Futures: On Anticolonialism in Egypt'(2020).

Ghost Sitings

As a slower, revenant but also a divergent

The Unit was particularly interested in the

second-life of ‘Dialogues with Dust’, our Unit

spectral hauntings of aspiration or legacy, truth

hosted a series of virtually-accessed public

and trauma that is made manifest through screens, skins, facades and surfacings in these

tours were produced with the intention to

spaces . These were ideas we would come back

enter — through the stories, research and

to in each of these tours, to inform subjects

— the atmospheres and conditions of site and

various ways of ‘surfacing’ as forms of employing

notions of situating practice. They took place

method in research and design choices and

in Durban, where we were able to we explore

practices.Concepts of representation, image

the beachfront, highways, the suburbs, and

making, framing, rendering were emergent

the outer edges, as well as personal spatial

fascinations.

passages through the city. We also conducted ghost tours elsewhere:The unrealised supercity Modderfontein project in the north of Johannesburg, and the greater Karoo in complex small towns like Beaufort West and

Ghost Sitings were hosted by Zen Marie, Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Lindsay Bush, Roanne Oberholzer, Jenna Bass, Ayesha Mukadam and Kassie Naidoo, Ricardo Reboredo and Jose Ignacio Martin.

Ghost Sitings 2021 Posters, with ghost tours through Durban, the unrealised megacity of Modderfontein, the Greater Karoo , Graaff-Reinet and Senegal, among others.

Durban At the end of May 2021, we traveled with our students to Durban where we studied historical sites, leisure zones on the beachfront, and the surfaces that represent other times and other places.

18+ Series

As part of Unit 18’s studio, we ran a series of

provided immersed exposure to these in a rapid

engagements, workshops and talks with artists

way - to give our students a kind of shopping list of expanded ways of working, also paired with

series spanned two years and included three

intellectual processing of what it means to be working in these mediums.

14+ Series and the 18+ Ghost Sitings Series.

In addition to this, part of our time was

To broaden and strengthen our ways of working

spent looping back to local and international

or methods, we attributed teaching time to

practitioners’ work, and the work of our own

exposing our students to other ways of making

practices–which centrally work with these

or representing, particularly in digital editing

mediums–to help provide tangible examples of

languages like VR, 3D printing, image editing

how these might be applied.

the doors

Talk presented by

zach blas Artist, filmmaker, writer & lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

25 Feb 2021 14h30 - 15h15 SAST DM for details

Unit 18 Hyperreal Prototypes Graduate School of Architecture University of Johannesburg

18+ SERIES

project

Workshop presented by

bongani kona

Workshop presented by

Writer & Editor at Chimurenga Writng Workshop

GSA EXTRAS Photography Course Leader Lighting & Camera Set Up

Graduate of Unit 14, GSA UJ, Unit 14 Tutor Photographic Editing

28 May 2020 14h30 - 15h30 ZOOM: Graduate of Unit 13, GSA UJ Virtual 3D Documentation

Unit 18 Hyperreal Prototypes Graduate School of Architecture University of Johannesburg

Please Email gsaunit18@gmail.com for ZOOM Password

18+ SERIES

Mon 20th July: 10am-12pm Presentation of Project 8 Part 1 on Zoom Mon 20th July: 12pm - 1pm Workshop Introduction Wed 22nd July 9am - 12pm: Workshop Part A Thur 23rd July 9am - 12pm: Workshop Part B Final Submission: 27th July 2020, Presentations uploaded by 8am.

Unit 18 Hyperreal Prototypes Graduate School of Architecture University of Johannesburg

18+ SERIES 43

part one:

Unit Leads: Huda Tayob Sarah de Villiers Unit Tutor: Naadira Patel Unit Assistant: Adam Osman

2020

spectral hauntings

knowledge truth, narrative, archive

Izak, Leo, Nothando, Kamal, Fathima, Gila, Atiyyah

1.01. Truth Archives. Speculative urban installations which collect, reveal and leverage truths relating to the Egyptian Revolution.

Surveillance Prototypes Leo Da Silva Chicwambi, M2 51

Surveillance Prototypes

The research focuses on manipulations

understand contexts truthfully and enables us

and censorship of ‘truths’ around events

to act accordingly to those contexts.

in spaces that are caused by individuals or governments for their own interests. Particular focus is on HOW the ‘truths’ of these spaces, events and activities may be augmented or shunted by surveillance gazes, in turn reproducing untruthful representations of spaces. What are the methodologies that can be developed to unpack, map and expose the hidden phenomenon of these ‘truths’? How

Surveillance Prototypes is a new type of digital public space for ‘holding truths’ as an active Information collected acts as a spectacle (making the invincible visible) in a climate of erasure and censoring. It is digital as a website and ‘real’ by drawing on multiple collected narratives of a physical public space.

does surveillance of such spaces attribute to hyperreal versions of themselves? The project

Above: 1.02. Surveillance Algorithms. Maps the routes one might take to reconstruct a site (here, Alexandria and its ports) from afar, built through various surveillance-gazes available on the Internet social media, Google Earth and other open-source information archives.

1.02. Invention Bias Disguiser Analogue tool to show the forms of profiling bias against non-western body types, as experienced at gateways of transit

Above: 1.04. Body Surveillance Prototyping spatial representations for ‘truths’ that question both technological surveillance gazes, but also architectural representations as surveillance gazes Right: 1.05. Port Occurrences Development of a forensic drawing methodology for a particular drug bust at Alexandria port, based on occupation of various digital screens and surveilled accounts of the event through the media.

Precedent for Resistance (Series). Revelation of existing architectural elements on Tahrir Square which are shown to be complicit in the resilience of ‘countertruths’. These spaces become safe spaces where accounts of the events might be protected and can circulate, contrary to the intentions of the state to erase certain inconvenient details. These models are accompanied by a series of choreographic and ethnographic drawings. Above: 1.06.The Hammam. Far Right: 1.07. The Square. Right: 1.08. The Workshop.

1.09. Site Deconstructions Deepening explorations and prototyping for alternative, extended and layered ‘views’ of space.

2.01. Embodied Archive: Woven Memoir A recollection of the women in Nothando’s childhood,and development of a representational language to talk through subjugation, beauty and craft of Bantu women.

Mnemonic Devices: Exposing the Margin Within Institutional Spaces of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa Nothando Lunga, M2 59

Mnemonic Devices: Exposing the Margin Within Institutional Spaces of Power In Post-Apartheid South Africa

The project is an archive, understood as an event space memorialising protests in post-

post-apartheid context, further identifying those

apartheid South Africa. The work is made in

marginalized in the process of democratizing

pursuit of politically motivated speculations

hauntings of past repressive systems, in the present. The project advances theories of memory to account for contemporary forms of activism through design.

events, namely the Treason Trial of 1956, Anguish Longer Than Sorrow (J?!(/"(/7$3 2012), #FeesMustFall student movement, and #AfrikaansSalBly protest of 2017. It uses both analogue methods of crafting

Most centrally, what is proposed, is a roving

and digital simulations to conceptualize and

archive and gathering, with an initial siting

develop a mnemonic framework as a form of

at Constitution Hill. The project intentionally

insurgency and emancipation. It also forms a

operates in the margin as a space that

spatial experience that makes archives visible

necessitates resistance against oppression. It

and simultaneously records memories and

aims to transform and speculate alternative

interactions.

futures and new discourses through creating a resistance sustained by, “remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (hooks 1989:4). The project explores the premise of memory as an essential apparatus of transformation— may act as grounds for speculative futures By speculating the insertion of an installation, which comprises of a series of prototypes that

2.02. Final Supper of the Bantu Education Act of 1953 Research on the formation of past repressive systems and their representatives and representations.

2.03. Virtual Activism An algorithmic response to forming new archival methodologies.

2.04. The Final Gathering Multi-sensorial spatial installation revealing the continuum of history through the layering of four historic events that challenged the status quo of institutions of power.

Mnemonic Devices: Exposing the Margin Within Institutional Spaces of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

2.05. The Awaiting Trial Block Cell

2.06. Spatial [RE]claimer Performance-based response to sexual harassment in the public space, containing the Pannier, Skirt and Trail components.

2.07. The Final Gathering A set of developed architectural structures which, through sound, membranes and gathering spaces, develop a proposed repository and activist space which exists with both physical and digital apertures to the public.

3.01. The Directory Flyover A still from a moving game-simulation which shows how the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza is altered by latching new devices to its architecture and interior exhibitions which act as visualising tools towards the affects of hyperobjects on our cities, nations and planet.

A Video Game to Operate the Form-Less Hyperobjects that Have Shaped the Giza Plateau for Millennia Izak Potgieter, M2 67

A Video Game to Operate the Form-Less Hyperobjects that Have Shaped the Giza Plateau for Millennia

This project uses the tools and tactics of

of architectural devices which act as registers

interactive media to create a video game:

for humankind’s causal acts which have

a directory of architectural devices and experiments in operating and monitoring the form-less hyperobjects that have shaped the Giza plateau (in Egypt) over millennia. When playing the game, one is able to directly manipulate, control and even sabotage these architectural devices. Every action or inaction one takes in the game ‘prints’ a trace onto a digitized Giza plateau. Excavating ghostly matter:

Manipulating hyperobjects through interactive media: Using interactive media (as in a video game), these devices are capable of simulating hyperobjects in an imagined environment that a user could enter and manipulate. It is a risk-free space where extreme actions may be

The Giza plateau is demarcated and excavated for what Avery Gordon calls "ghostly matters...

this designed realm. The way in which a user would manipulate these devices are based on

be examined” (Gordon 1997). The concept

the ways in which these forces historically have

of ghostly matter provides a methodological

been played out on the landscape, and have

framework with which to identify and document the traces left by hyper-objects that have

Expressing invisible forces: The project works between the digital and the analogue to translate invisible aspects of place into parameters for making tangible game devices, some of which might be embodied or in its eventual physical landscape) are used as the parameters for constructing a series

Right: 3.03. Composite Directory of Devices. Each device ‘prints’ an environmental

consequence of a

large-scale, normally abstract force.

Below: 3.02 Rates of Change & Spatial Receipt. Changing ‘outputs’ of the landscape or eventual built / affected form, based on the player’s actions.

3.04. The Urban Stamps A still from the video game developed.

3.05. The Seismometer A still from the video game developed.

3.06. System Axonometrics: The Erosion Chamber

3.07. System Axonometrics: The Urban Stamps

4.01. Shepheard’s Reconstruction Known to many as a ‘centre of life in Cairo’ (and a stronghold of colonialism, before its destruction in the 1952 Cairo Fire), the Shepheard’s hotel is recosntructed here through various accounts.

Hyperreal Perspicuities: Multi-Narrative Reconstructions of Modern Egypt Kamal Ranchod, M2 75

Hyperreal Perspicuities: Multi-Narrative Reconstructions of Modern Egypt

This project investigates drawing and drawn

and challenge centralized power structures.

perspective as a tool that is deeply political, and

Secondly, the concept of Performative

prototypes architectural representations in the form of drawings, instruments and immersive

a tactic, which challenges the Cartesian way of

videos. These prototypes develop modes of

seeing that separates the observer from the

representation which subvert linear viewpoints

observed, proposing navigation as performance

(using the manipulable power of drawing that

which transforms observers into participants

has been uncovered) to illustrate the multiplicity

within space.

of narratives embedded within space and its representations.

The project takes the form of an event that

Focusing on Modern Egypt between 1827 and

comprises of histories and monuments from the

1952, the project uses drawing to construct

three historical events mentioned earlier, and

the hidden hauntings of colonialism and

culminates in a set of redrawn representations

modernization across three historical events.

of events which have taken place, which in turn

These events include the Battle of Navarino, The

suggest potential for altered histories.

Bombardment of Alexandria and the 1952 Cairo Fire. The project draws its tactics from two sources. First, is the idea of a Rhizome in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. Rhizomes are subterranean root formations found in plants such as ginger. Rhizomes operate below the surface growing horizontal into decentralized structures working with ideas of heterogeneity, connection, multiplicities and cartography. This subverts linear narratives, privileged viewpoints,

4.02. Shepheard’s Hotel Interior. A virtual ghost of the hotel is remade in a threedimensional navigable space, which also serves as an archival repository for historical events.

4.03. Sunken Ship Perspective This drawing tilts the perspective toward the sea floor, to question what secrets it might tell - which counters the dominance of the victor’s narrative in the Battle of Navarino in the Mediterranean Sea.

4.04. Belle Epoch Cairo. Speculative drawings which unpack the dual nature of Cairo that led up to the 1952 fire, working with the schism in social structures and aspiration that emerged.

Hyperreal Perspicuities: Multi-Narrative Reconstructions of Modern Egypt

4.05. Monument of the Fallen Naval Soldier The monument is reconstructed using the methods of Photomodelling, projecting, tracing, folding, distorting, slicing, combining, overlaying and collaging to talk about and reconfigure the absence of information regarding the monument’s history

4.06. Parade of Phantoms: Scene 3 - Bombardment of Alexandria. Stereographic, tilting up and down projection is used to work through confrontations with historical record of a political event. The position of the observer may alter meaning in the understanding of events.

Above: 4.08. Parade of Phantoms: Scene 1 - Battle Of Navarino Steriographic ‘looking from the centre’ and ‘zooming’ manipulations. This prototyping centres the victim or victor position.

5.01 Film-still excerpts from The Many Sides of The Square.

The Many Sides of The Square Fathima Mula, M1 83

The Many Sides of the Square

In particular, it pays attention to intermediaries of record through screens (via our phones, TVs, or the internet). The work resurfaces most notably as the main site of protest for the Arab Spring beginning in 2011. To dissuade any

only the information and research that can

inclination towards a new revolution, the last

be accessed from afar, to reconstruct what is

few years have seen the systematic erasure of the traces of protest under military rule. As animation, the project attempts to resurface during the revolution can only be accessed

truth. Fiction, here, is used as a device which

through archived media footage, a ghostly digital

in a sense distances itself from primary-source

space that is also slowly being censored and

footage, employing a layer of translation

deleted – and individual memory, which cannot

through new illustrations. But it is here that

be voiced under threat of arrest.

there is a kind of safe-space constructed to address a slightly more coherent view of the

within the making and unmaking of the space.

Left: 5.02. The Wide Shot (Battle of the Camel Series) Right: 5.03. The Establishing Shot (Battle of the Camel Series).

5.04.The Media Window (The Battle of the Camel Series) ‘Close-up’ frame of a critical site where ‘truth’ is gathered by reporters in nearby hotel rooms, interfered with and eventually seized by military officers.

The Many Sides of the Square

5.05. Set Design Tactics - Scene 1 Shot 8 Developed as an accompaniment to the final animated short, showing how scenes, shots, sound, protagonists and spatial realms were reconstructed from actual footage, and reconstituted into a narrative which counters the erased narratives by the Egyptian government around the event of the Egyptian Revolution.

5.06. Still from The Many Sides of The Square animated short.

5.07. Still from The Many Sides of The Square animated short.

5.08. Still from The Many Sides of The Square animated short.

5.09. Still from The Many Sides of The Square animated short.

The Many Sides of the Square

5.10. Set Design Tactics - Scene 3 Shot 2.

6.01. Seder Plate Topography. Maps of gestures, repetition, speeds, lingering and relationships to planetary ‘rotations’ including lunar cycles.

Prototypes: The Transformation of Tradition Gila Abrams, M1 91

Prototypes: The Transformation of Tradition

This project looks at the adaptations and

project uses architectural elements of the Ben

changes in Jewish history, tradition and rituals.

Ezra Synagogue to create speculations for new

These ideas are explored through multiple

vessels and materials which might hold and

chapters and prototypes.

relay histories. In addition, speculations are able

This project uses archival theory, oral histories, personal experiences and social media as the

as well as interactive models as spatial tools to think through histories and tradition, and to prototype new ways of seeing transformational slippages of tradition over time. These tools the haunted histories of Jews in Egypt and the Geniza archive. Situated at the Ben Ezra Synagogue and the Geniza Archive found within its walls, this project traces the history of Jews in Egypt from the 10th century through to the 1960’s. This

6.02. The Geniza Archives From children’s homework, to shopping lists and marriage documents, to the religious Jewish texts from the 9th-12th century, mappings of the everyday, and also the iconic or sacred help contribute towards layered accounts and interconnected geographies of community in Cairo.

to include and juxtapose the everyday objects recalled in the Geniza documents and their modern interpretations, and objects belonging By delving into this new archive and exploring the everydayness of these objects one is able to trace the layers of change and explore the fragments of Egyptian Jewish history and Jewish tradition and ritual.

6.03. Traces of Jewish Tradition Remnant and transforming traces of Jewish life which now exists as almost completely lost within the broader contemporary Cairo are collated into a time-based ‘non-iconic’ archive of the everyday ‘other’.

6.04. Fragments of Tradition An interactive model is developed, where light and shadow reveal and change as the game, which is based on the Jewish Passover Seder tradition and structural layouts of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, is manipulated. The piece attempts to trace how traditions and rituals change when external elements, such as Covid-19, are imposed onto existing circumstance and long-performed physical rituals.

6.05. Archive of the Everyday: Museum Map Sited at the Ben Ezra Synagogue, the project begins to speculate ‘routes of history’ which might entangle with another route. Architectural elements become gateways to information, and also vessels for history and repetitive forms of copied traditions themselves.

Above: 6.06.-6.09. Archive of the Everyday - Various Route Sequences The routes look to transverse the Synagogue itself, but also extend out into adjacent buildings and street spaces to suggest new hybridisations with other spatial and cultural bodies. There is no linear way to enter this experience, and a route may change permanently to an unexpected outcome or new arrangement.

7.01. Suture An abstracted trilogy that compiles various subversive tunnel routes through the Rafah border, which suggest alternate types of edges between nations that work more sectionally than as a diagrammed line on plan.

Engravings and Stitches: Tactical Mapping Against the Oppressions at the Rafah Border Atiyyah Ameen, M1 97

Engravings and Stitches: Tactical Mapping Against the Oppressions at the Rafah Border

The Sinai Peninsula stands as a historically

Engraving, stitching and tearing become

contested territory, on the eastern edge of

political acts in these new fabric maps which

Egypt currently abutted by Israeli-Occupied

call into view hauntings of displaced villages and

Territory, and mediated by the Rafah border.

communities. The terror of spatial violences

This fascinating and volatile space holds within

through warfare, traces of subterranean

in itself legible remnant registrations of power

smuggling tunnels which traverse the ground

in space, oppression to certain groups, and the

level border, circumventing sea-bound vessels

circumventions of such power through spatial

and lesser-known trade routes which intersect

acts– past and present – with its various states of historical political instability through time.

shown. The project considers ‘tissue’ or systems

This project explores representational tactics

of thread or linkage between communities and their land and suggests an ‘unravelling’

drawn political map. These tactics are produced

through representation to understand the

both as a means to overlay textured stories

territories systems of connection, division and

of resistance and protest not normally held in

precariousness.

view of the geographic map. In doing so, the work considers the three-dimensional attributes of land, and the messy nature of borders as they are studied as three-dimensional spaces, realised on the ground. Vulnerabilities and strange futilities of borders become visible when studying their existences in material form, beyond those seen, just, as abstracted lines on a map.

7.02 Curvature Explosion Exploration into the precarity of land and earth, through unpacking the volume and interior ‘skin’ of the inside of an illegal border-tunnel.

7.03. Route, Buffers A drawing to map two systems of ‘lines’ in opposition - the border or edge, and the lines which seek to pierce through this: that is the route. Onground, subterranean, sea and air based routes and their buffering military counterparts are drawn.

Engravings and Stitches: Tactical Mapping Against the Oppressions at the Rafah Border

7.04. (Un)Readable. (In)Accessible. Due to conflict in this region, imagery cannot be attained past AlArish. The area becomes ‘flat’, undocumented and inaccessible in all 3D platforms accessed of this area. The realm of influence of Israel transgresses the border to ‘manage risk’ beyond even reaching the border itself through producing surveyed blind-spots.

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Above: 7.05. The Act of Making and Unmaking A recipe for bread-making, which traces ingredients, bodies and tradition that transgresses across political and restricted borders

in the Egyptian

and Sinai Peninsular region.

Above Left: 7.06. The Struggle. A route exploded, expanded and imploding, speculating new spatial possibilities of access. Above Right: 7.07. Is This Humane? Makes visible through a series of sewn tactics various hidden violences of control and denial through the Rafah Border as documented ‘on the ground’, as well as mapping of ‘blind-spots’ in other open-source information bases (for example Google Earth) where visibility is seen as a threatening spatial attribute.

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home and belonging

Karabo, Gloria, Zahraa, Jessica

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8.01. Amina’s Courtyard: The Al-Sayyid Jawad Residence

The Unhomely Prototype: The ‘Seraglio’ and the Unsettling of Amina Karabo Moumakwe, M2 105

The Unhomely Prototype: The ‘Seraglio’ and the Unsettling of Amina

The project asks, what spatial media might assist

Huda’s memoirs and Mahfouz’s Palace Walk.

with the outlay, analysis and reimagination of text through the theoretical frames of the

Double, Imaginary and Recurring Manifestations,

unhomely (Freud 1919, Vidler 1992), and the

etc.) informed by the theoretical framework of

haunting or the ghostly (Gordon 1997) ? This

Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny (1990) and Anthony

subject is studied particularly with concepts of

Vidler’s ‘The Architectural Uncanny’ (1992) in

female occupation, embodiment and refuge in

the home place. The thesis output is prompted

space. It uses the narratives of the Palace Walk

by Michel Foucault’s third heterotopic principle

(Mahfouz 1956) and The Harem Years (Sha’arawi

of the theatre as a site of anomalous multiple spaces and sites occur in the ‘same’ rectangle

medium might successfully capture how Huda

of a stage (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986, p.

(Harem Years) and Amina (Palace Walk) are

25). Vidler and Freud’s position the uncanny

forced to occupy the harem system home-

as primarily as a domestic, interior-borne

space in multiple heterotopic ways - especially

phenomenon, and traditional/conventional

articulating how they might conform, resist, supernatural and eerie. At its culmination, the Unhomely Prototype encourages: navigation.

QF27!/","/!).!+.,%-#/"$-"*%,7.+!%H(.(*-#.,(."#$. #!H$.(2,-$.,(.,).,%-#/B$.!+.7/B$:3.-!)"%!77$:3.

comprised of three acts, in which Amina, the

,):.?$):$%$:.$F2$%/$)-$(3./).R!"#.K,?*/R.

protagonist of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk

M,#+!*P<(.6,7,-$.9,7O.,):.@#$.1,%$H.S$,%(3.

(1956) experiences extreme purdah at the

"#%!*?#.+/7H.,):.2$%+!%H,)-$N

hands of her tyrannical husband, Al-Sayyid much of the outside world’, and is confronted Huda Sha’arawi (1879-1924). This protagonist is taken from Sha’arawi’s text which encapsulates her memoirs, in The Harem Years (1986),

D%?*H$)"."#,".#!H$(.,):."#$.#,%$H.(5("$H3. 2,%"/-*7,%75./)."#$.-!)"$F".!+.1*:,.,):.DH/),3. H/?#".R$.+%,H$:.,(./)("/"*"/!)(.!+.2,"%/,%-#,7. 2!'$%.,):.-!)"%!73.,):.,7(!.,(.#$"$%!"!2/,(.+!%. "#$.($-7*:$:3.,):."#$.B$/7$:.+$H,7$./).L7:.;(7,H/-. 8,/%!N

introducing an outspoken feminist who existed

D):.+/),7753.,.:$2/-"/!).!+."#/(.2%!2!(/)?.,.

in Amina’s time but was not of her world.

"#$,"%/-,7.!*"2*"."#,".,""$H2"(."!.(5H2,"#/($.

This same protagonist who is juxtaposed into

,):.(2,"/,7/($.H*7"/27$.7/B$:.$F2$%/$)-$(.

Amina’s realm had advocated for the liberation

$H27!5/)?.",-"/-(.!+.H/%%!%/)?3.:!*R7/)?3.*)-,))5.

of the woman from the harem system and both

H,)/+$(","/!)(./).(2,-$.,):.#,*)"/)?(N

the patriarchal gaze and rule, depicted in both

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8.02. Double Performance 1: Joe and the Poet Two narratives, the first from the Black Mirror episode ‘White Christmas’ (2014) and the second extracted from Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (1996) explore spatial contributors to atmospheres of the uncanny in copied, or familiar (and unfamiliar) states.

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8.03 Scene Mapping: Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk Reconstructed psycho-geographic narratives collated with retrieved film, Google Street View and online archives.

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The Unhomely Prototype: The ‘Seraglio’ and the Unsettling of Amina

8.03. Scene Mapping: Amina’s Interaction with Site Fictional accounts of Amina’s familiar spatial realms are a overlaid with present-day Cairo.

8.04. Site: Al-Sayyid Ahmad Jawwad’s Residence A developed fictional site based on the two intersecting narratives.

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8.05. Amina & Huda; The Three Acts: (i) Unfamiliar Magic - manifestations of the outside into the inside, (ii) Acts of Service & Guilty Pleasures - insertions of a double protagonist, (iii) Fitna - new manifestations and doubling between the two interacting fictional protagonists takes place.

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8.06. Fitna Extract from new, glitched narrative: After her morning ritual on the roof, Amina descends the stairway and hears a clap in the hallway, announcing Ali Shaarawi’s arrival. She congratulates him on the birth of his son out of wedlock. The scene of Huda’s departure leaves behind concrete openings to the outside, toward the mosque...

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8.07. Amina & Huda: A Double Performance Still from filmic

navigation through the two

entwining uncanny narratives. Exploration layers architectural rendering, embodied performance and bodily movements, accompanying shadow and film into a multimedia piece.

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(to eat

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Home-Making: An Anthology of Hyperreal Cooking Preserves Gloria Pavita, M2 115

Home-Making: An Anthology of Hyperreal Cooking Preserves

utangulizi

O*2/O, (preparation) of these foods, particularly

(prologue)

of cassava, in its prevalence in the foodscape

In reaching for home and in the making of it here, in South Africa, there are labours to be borne. The labours our hands and bodies bear as women extend beyond South Africa. These labours are read as hauntings, an absent

of migrant foodways in varying forms between South Africa and Central and Western Africa. These labours are read, embodied and traced or made as artefact.

presence in the act of home- and place-making

Home cannot exist without the words of our

for women considered marginal.

mothers’ tongues, without the work in their

This project looks at memory, and at the intimacy of personal history and lived experience to uncover the labours embedded in the home-making rituals enacted by migrant people through food. These labours of body, hands and speech experienced by migrant people, often women mu O*%/H, (ploughing), O*O!H$(#,. (growing),.O*R$R$(#,.(collection), O*"',)?,. (processing), O*-#*)?,.(preservation) and

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hands and bodies, carried by their mothers before them, and other women that host the places that bear these traces of home in food. We are daughters of the same grain,./).?,%%/3.*T/. ),.*?,7/N

Opposite: 9.07.

Above: 9.05.

habari ya sombe

ramani ya kimataifa

(manners of cassava leaves) act: read, written, drawn scale: body, market trace: memory, stains, strain

(transnational map) act: read, drawn, made scale: transnational trace: memory, strain, trade

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Home-Making: An Anthology of Hyperreal Cooking Preserves

9.03. nyumbani na mbali (home &

away)

act: read, performed, made, filmed scale: hand, body trace: memory, stains

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9.02. uji na ugali (daughters

of the same grain)

act: read, written, made, drawn, filmed scale: hand trace: voice, muscle memory, imprint

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9.04. kuchora kazi (drawing work/workiing drawing) act: read, written, made, drawn scale: body, building trace: memory, stain, strain, scent, sound, soil, synthetic fibre colour #34, synthetic polymer

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(to eat)

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10.01 Dollhouse Model: Spice route, kitchen and scullery from above

Homemade Prototypes: Deconstructing Domestic Decorum Zahraa Essa, M2 123

Homemade Prototypes: Deconstructing Domestic Decorum

10.02 Third of Ramadan City A calendar for regions in the kitchen and dining room

In a manifesto of women’s environmental rights

rooms to reveal the ‘hauntings’ (Gordon 2008)

written in the 1980s, Leslie Kanes Weisman

of the colonial legacy which are instituted and

(2002:2) states: “A homemaker has no inviolable space of her own. She is attached to spaces of service. She is a hostess in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, a mother in the children’s room,

become registered in the spatial organisations of the home.

garage”. This describes the home as a highly gendered realm where a woman is always in service of a husband or a child.

The project does this by understanding that produced and reproduced. The project, therefore,

This project recognizes home as an institution, capable of administering, managing and purveying power. It argues that home always

Weisman (2002:2). Focusing on four enactments

speaks to that which is intimately present and

in domestic space, namely: cooking, cleaning,

simultaneously ‘away’ — that is to say diasporic

childcare and décor, the project investigates

or absent. These absences can be understood

how domestic practices and the “arrangement of

as ‘hauntings’, (Gordon 2008) always present, yet

domestic space” (Evans 1978) reinforce issues of

often unacknowledged.

power dynamics, race, and gender.

The creation of miniature domestic scenarios dates to models found in ancient Egyptian tombs illustrating what daily life in Egypt was like. However, versions of 17th-century dollhouses scale replicas of the homes they were situated in, as a display and direct representation and ‘mini monuments’ of wealth and social status. Thereafter, dollhouses become co-opted tools to teach young girls how to run a household and adopt traditionally gendered roles. The project uses the dollhouse as a vessel through which to prototype and navigate six rooms in the heteropatriarchal South African Indian Muslim home. It deconstructs the constituents in the

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10.03. The Living Room: Etiquette of Decorum Tracings of domestic protocol and polite manners as signals of empire and colony, which still pervade.

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Homemade Prototypes: Deconstructing Domestic Decorum

10.04. The Cabinet of Curiosities and The Dollhouse Film still.

10.07. Servers Interrogates systems of display versus systems of invisibility, through the dresser cabinet in the dining room, and the sink area of the scullery

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10.06. A Surface for Cooking Tracing of the passage of granite counter surfaces, spike and silk routes on a simultaneously planetary and microbial (bread) scale.

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11.01. Death in Nubia Narrative drawing of a funerary ceremony, which attempts to reconstruct this disintegrating cultural tradition through drawing, but also simultaneously stages an imagined allegorical funeral for the broader loss incurred within Nubian culture, owing to the group’s historical displacement from their original geographical positions and ties to land.

Nubian Holding Patterns: Prototypes of Spatial Resilience Jessica Cristovao, M2 131

Nubian Holding Patterns: Prototypes of Spatial Resilience

11.01. Death in Nubia (cont.)

This project is interested in the recurrence and

taking the form of large community events. I use

disappearance of ceremonialism and rituals

this as the basis for my research and explore

among the Nubian people of Egypt. Working

ways to repeat or recreate and re-imagine once

through and studying old rituals, this project

existing rituals within a new contemporary

constructs prototypes of spatial resilience

context. A future has been imagined with the

through ways of seeing and remembering.

introduction of the Sun Festival and renovation

These prototypes make visible and conscious,

of Abu Simbel Temple which now becomes the

how things were; it reveals hidden and forgotten

space for the continuity of ceremonialism in

patterns of an endangered culture.This study

New Nubia.

aims to reveal and explore some of the most important and distinctive aspects of Nubian culture, by studying a series of spaces, rituals and performances in and around the home and community. The displacement of the Nubian people came with a deep cultural loss seen in language deterioration, loss of community spirit, a shift in the role of women in society, attire, customs, spatial arrangements and changes in political and economic life. Nubian life was centered around ceremonies and rituals, many of these

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11.02. Holding Waters Displacement mapping of the Nubian villages that were forced to uproot and move by way of the Aswan High Dam infrastructure project.

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Nubian Holding Patterns: Prototypes of Spatial Resilience

11.01. Death in Nubia (cont.)

11.03. The Sun Festival at Simbel: A Nubian (re)Birth. A new archive programme is speculatively inserted into the existing cavity of the temple, and an accompanying ceremony is produced. Nubian artefacts are re-centred and brought to the forefront over those from Ancient Egypt. The proposition questions origins and ‘new memory’ that is produced at the cost of others which are displaced.

Nubian Holding Patterns: Prototypes of Spatial Resilience

11.04. The Killed: Old Nahia A tracing of loss that has embodied registers in memory, remembrance of spaces for cooking, eating, sleeping, hosting guests, or various wedding or grief observance rituals, that no longer exist with the same generosity and design in new homes the displaced Nubians have had to assume. Constricton of space in the home constricts purveyance of a culture.

11.05. Excerpt from Tales of Displacement Drawn short stories of climactic, political, economic and psychological challenges that displacement inflicts on indigenous groups

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11.06 Stations of Loss: What do We have Left? Drawn ‘spatial defiances’ that manifest in new homes to recall Nubian tradition, producing a hybridised building type.

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othering, margins... centre Siwe, Mpho, Meghana, Natalie

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12.01. The Nubian Return: Part 1 - Erasure Film performance still.

The Black Female Return Siwelile Mathenjwa, M1 141

The Black Female Return 12.02. Right (above) Erasure Dress. Embodying violence

of displacement and constriction

of movement through design of a wearable garment. 12.03. Right (below) Holy Waters. Mapping of Nubian fertility and marriage rituals and their relationship to land, geography and very specific landscape features.

This work narrates the struggle of black women in urban spaces. It also serves as a manifesto,

the black women dismantle spatial hierarchies

against forms of oppression against black female bodies in how they experience space. The work purposefully centres ways in which to insert, and importantly and make visible, the black woman in space both in the post-colonial contexts of South Africa and Egypt.

The work demonstrates prototypes with which to do this, through acts of veiling, unveiling and a lexicon of adornment. These are enacted and performed with particular costumes in certain

The project sets out to do this through a proposed series of wearable prototypes that, through dress and enactment, incorporate performance art as a protest tool, and as a realm for exploration beyond the realms of protests through the creation of wearable devices. These aim to bring visibility to black women who have been consistently blotted

12.04. The Nubian Return. Film still from a performance piece that shows claiming of space through the embodied act of certain rituals in relation to land and space.

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The Black Female Return

12.05. Tent Making on the Female Body : Embodied Protest Garment Assembly drawing of a garment, which incorporates ancient techniques of tent-making to develop a garment which mediates the body to its outer environment through protection and accommodation.

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The Black Female Return

12.06. Black In Space Film performance still.

12.07. The Nubian Return. Film performance still.

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12.08. The Nubian Return. Questioning states of racism and belonging in Cairo of the Nubian black woman

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The Black Female Return

13.01. Constructing a Passage to Safety Study on the cumulative ‘safemaking’ thresholds of various institutional programmes. A 'kit of parts' is drawn to develop passages to safety, particularly at public to private spatial interfaces.

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13.07. Home as Safety Threshold 13.08. Police Station as Safety Threshold 13.09. De-constructing Safety in the Women’s Shelter

Cairo’s Safe Sanctuary Mpho Molaoa, M1 149

Cairo’s Safe Sanctuary

This project centres a speculative women’s shelter within Cairo, situated on Talaat Harb Street. This site was noted, through various claims in the media, as notorious for large groups of men having attacked several women in the street. These events informed the project framing of a responsive architecture that aims to counter threat or harm of women on the street of Talaat Harb. The project prototypes various modes of architecture that might be complicit in providing better realms of care towards targeted pedestrians or civilians, and takes on the readjustment of the archetypes that govern the thresholds of access (that are

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both visual and physical). This project suggests new forms of supervision, absorption, provision and production of architectural surfaces and edges to ‘others’ outside of their realms, and looks to thicken skins, façades and walls of buildings which touch public realms with programs and materiality which shelters these others from harm, even for a protects women through acts of spatially revealing and concealing particular bodies or programmes, assisted by adjusted performance of the archetypes of the door, window and facade.

Above: 13.03. Analysis of Threats in Downtown Cairo Developed as a multi-layered GIF, a map is produced showing gendered interactions of risk, vulnerability and harm on a street in Cairo Left: 13.02. Secret Dialect for Safety Development of a book of gestures for existing and new forms of safety-making in relation of the body to public space

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Cairo’s Safe Sanctuary

Above (Upper). 13.04. Protest Manouvre 1 - The Clothing Store (Abaya Store) Above (Lower). 13.05. Protest Manouvre 2 - The Women’s Bathroom These are developed as thickened edges or surfaces of a building adjacent to Talaat Haab Street, where an escape route is built into the programme and system of privacy and apertures in these space.

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13.06. The Facade as a Protective Skin The facade becomes a fast-deployed interactive device that is increasingly complicit in shielding vulnerable groups from genderbased violence

acts

which might play out on adjacent street spaces.

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14.01. Home and the Microfactory

Industrialisation of the Home: Tools, Waste and Circularity in the Zabbaleen Community in Cairo Meghana Patel, M1 155

Industrialisation of the Home: Tools, Waste and Circularity in the Zabbaleen Community in Cairo

Cairo’s 15 million inhabitants generate an

of events or distances in the production

average of 9 000 tons of household solid

method. This takes into consideration both

waste everyday. Thousands of residents of

the environmental care these workers already

Cairo, known as Zabbaleen (Arabic for garbage

contribute towards, but also suggests how

collectors) collect about one-third of this waste. They undertake the daily tasks of door-to-

environmental conditions for themselves

door collection, transport, sorting, recovery,

or their immediate familial nuclei. The key

trading, and re-manufacturing of waste taken

aspects, in order to break down the timeline

from households from major sections of Cairo.

of events, are honed in around the scale of

Their sorting spaces are adjacent to their living

tools used in the re-processing stage, and

spaces, sometimes readjusting domestic realms

how these may latch onto domestic practices

into double worlds that include light industry

and their spaces where they make sense to.

or micro-factories, or informally appropriating

Production time is shortened, material value

service spaces in apartment buildings, such as

increases in their intersection with cultural

roof areas as production space. The recycling

value, and so contributes increased capacity

micro-enterprise industry has generated jobs

towards livelihoods and social cohesion with the

and incomes for an estimated 40 000 people. All

community, and the community with the city.

this activity is in the informal sector. Industrialisation of the Home explores the dynamics of the Zabbaleen community, particularly in the extents of their intimate but also urban spatial realms. Through the view of the existing value chain, a set of representations emerge which includes a shortened chain

14.02. Hand-Tool Prototyping Ethnographic informants drawn from Zabbaleen systems of processing of waste are translated and combined with architectural and household materials to develop speculative waste transformation prototypes that are operated at the scale of the body.

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14.03. Processing Level Stack Developed from the project’s ethnographic learnings, a housing system that hybridises light industry into its make up is speculated. Their design includes provision of several ‘use-less’ rooms that can accommodate transitional functions of both programmes.

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Industrialisation of the Home: Tools, Waste and Circularity in the Zabbaleen Community in Cairo

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Industrialisation of the Home: Tools, Waste and Circularity in the Zabbaleen Community in Cairo

14.05. Plastic-Processing Hand-Tool Microfactory - A Kit of Parts.

14.06. Rooftop Waste and Pigeon Network Isometric. As a well recognised sport for the Zabbaleen community, pigeon flying is incorporated into the processes of the proposed microfactory on the buildings’ roofscapes, as well as a system of ziplines to foster more efficient transport of waste and people in this dense area.

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14.07. Being Seen by Being Heard Developed prosthetic ‘sound staff’ prototype

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15.01. Our Hope in Prayer Speculative realm which brings living, dead and the marginalised together to register physical markers of belonging and place.

The Hybridized Home: Unveiling in Cairo’s Necropolis Natalie Harper, M1 163

The Hybridized Home: Unveiling in Cairo’s Necropolis

This project explores a cemetery dating back

Architecturally, this project looks at forms of

to the 17th Century, located on the eastern

domestic hybridization – and how certain spaces

outskirts of Old Cairo, and is one of city’s largest

intended for the dead might be co-opted back

necropolises. Interestingly, this is not only a city

into service of the living. The daily processes,

for the dead, but many living people have taken

ideas of sanctuary and safety and traditional

to inhabit this territory too. It is unclear how many

rituals ‘make home’ and states of belonging.

people are living in the tombs of their families. Underground, there are several rooms which can

plans, this project also collates slowly cohered

be found underneath mausoleums which were

assemblages of experience of the community

built to house the departed.

(reconstructed from various testimonies

Yet, migration, expensive housing, and natural disasters have driven entire families to move into these mausoleums and new generations of Cairenes are born in these conditions, literally on top of the old. Unusual in their forms, this research also traces how these structures have more of a resemblance to small houses than tombs. This project looks at spatial processes displaced ‘othering’ of certain marginalised groups might haunt the central conceptions of modern Cairo.

15.02. Appliqué of Tin City Hand-made mapping of Gugulethu informal settlement as an early examination of ideas of assemblage, borders and separation.

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provided in the media) to depict, especially, the uncertainty in their relationship to land or place. The research extends into the understanding of how this community adapts to the conditions whilst also making a livelihood, and how the architectural backdrop of this area is complicit in these processes. The work culminates in a series of spatial prototypes which look to de-stabilise purpose-made spaces for assembly.

Above Left: 15.03. Ascension to Paradise: Event 2: Living Beyond Death - The Mausoleum A speculative event and related architecture to provide a physical point for assemblage and anchorage, towards a state of belonging. Above Right: 15.04. Ascension to Paradise: Event 3: Material Culture - The Cultural Centre

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The Hybridized Home: Unveiling in Cairo’s Necropolis

15.05. Urban and Geological Markers

15.06. Religious and Cultural Signals for Familiarity or Strangeness

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15.07. Markers for Memory and its Transference to Other Places or Times

Marker prototypes for belonging and anchorage.

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power, space, othering, afterlives

Thelma, Jana

16.01. The Queered Concourse

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Nocturnal Heterotopias: Prototyping the Event Place for Otherness Thelma Ndebele, M2 171

Nocturnal Heterotopias: Prototyping the Event Place for Otherness

This research project speculatively

Events and conditions surrounding the growing

conceptualises spaces for those deemed

Ballroom subculture involving LGBTQ+ youth in South Africa are used as prompts for

or gender performance transgress(es) existing

contextualising and basing the multi-sensorial

heteronormative ideas of personal identity,

sets proposed. This is done through drawing

still prevalent in present day, urban settings),

out Ballroom event prototypes which already

and their associated music subcultures. The

exist across the city, in insurgent instances, and

insistent creation of these spaces is a reaction

designing the experience around two types

to the lack of non-mainstream or underground

of people who make up this electronic music

performance venues in nocturnal, post-

subculture. These are then digitally inserted

apartheid Johannesburg. The term underground

into the speculated venue, the Old Park City

here refers to independent or community-

Concourse (b. 1926), insurgent and hidden in

based electronic music scenes. These proposed

the regular, everyday Johannesburg, thus re-

spaces are prototypical installations: temporary

imagining this pre-existing architectural shell,

set-designs situated in Johannesburg CBD,

and overhauling its colonial conservancies. The

crafted using a combination of light, music,

interactions that happen in and around the installations are digitally documented, using

of interpersonal interaction and embodied experience.

and spatial narratives that are uncovered and created.

16.02. Condensed Identities Collage of some types of identities found in the Ballroom: High Femme Queen, Non-Binary, and Butch Queen.

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16.03. Interaction Loops Recorded interactions found when entering a ballroom event, projected onto the newly queered concourse doorway

16.04. Prop Loops Recorded movements found inside a ballroom event, projected onto the newly queered concourse props.

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Nocturnal Heterotopias: Prototyping the Event Place for Otherness

16.05. Digital Multimedia Zine on Vogue Nights Jozi Archive collation of various subcultural queer practices across different geographies and times

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16.06. Still from 'Before the Ball' with PARIS BLANKA This short film follows the dressing and preparation ritual of a femme queen as they prepare to go to the ball in

downtown Johannesburg.

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Nocturnal Heterotopias: Prototyping the Event Place for Otherness

Above: 16.08. Control Stain of Live DJ Set Fabric mapping artefact of a DJ’s hand movements and gestures during a performance or live set.

Left: 16.09. Postcards from Otherwhere Spliced, twisted drawings that depict case studies of interior spaces and venues which house various subcultural music groups across the world.

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16.10. Tapestry installation showing the slippage between a real world and its perceived underworld.

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17.01. Mapping Dust Following fragments and particles as they have settled over greater Egypt and sections of the Middle East.

Ghost stories, hauntings and afterlives of the Suez Canal in Egypt Jana Crous, M2 179

Ghost Stories, Hauntings And Afterlives of The Suez Canal In Egypt

This project is an online exhibit, through

invisible traumas and events that haunt these

which visitors might experience forgotten

sites to this day. The last chapter of these

or inaccessible spaces and buildings from a distance. A collection of semi-real and semi-

several parts and scales of exploration into one view, using the master plan of the narrative structure, building materials, colonial masters,

modern-day Egypt. Events and buildings related

political spies, Soviet funds and revolutions — all connected and linked back to the Suez Canal —

narratives and characters. The use of video and user-experience relates to ghost stories and narratives of exclusion.

the theory of phenomenology and embodied

Language is also used as a method of spatial

experience, engaging how it might serve as

translation, or as a new way to frame what

an aid to individual memory. By combining

we might see as a visitor to this exhibition.

language, voices, sounds and drawings, the user

Descriptive words and literary tools are

can access these ghostly events and haunted

employed to aid the imagination in experiencing

buildings through an embodied experience,

spaces that might have been possible.

even at a distance, and virtually.

Sites visited in these stories include the Aswan High Dam Complex, Villa Casdagli and the Serageldin Palace in Downtown Cairo. These are attended by characters in the stories and are explored in drawing and text to reveal

Left: 17.02.City of Hostages Part 1 - Collage explorations of the economic and political events which led to the infrastructural and radical spatial effects to be brought on by the construction of the Aswan High Dam and nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Right: 17.03. City of Hostages Part 2 - Translations of the historical event of these water-related national infrastructural changes into architectural elements, later used as protagonists in an architectural narrative re-assemblage.

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17.04. Narrative Structure as Site Map

17.05. The Staircase of Forgetting

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Ghost Stories, Hauntings And Afterlives of The Suez Canal In Egypt

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17.06. Touching the Serageldin Palace. Crous, J. M2. 2020.

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part two:

Unit Leads: Naadira Patel Sarah de Villiers Unit Assistant: Nothando Lunga

2021

supersurfaces

heterotopia, fantasy, playspace, copies, worlds-inworlds Demi, Meghana, Fathima

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18.01 Johannesburg Double Scene from virtual game environment which twins Johannesburg and its many ‘faces’ at a site in Gold Reef City Theme Park.

Contradictory Co-Equals Virtual Heterotopia Demi Bridgland, M2 191

Contradictory Co-Equals: Virtual Heterotopia

This project holds fascination in the unmasking

Michel Foucault writes of heterotopic sites

of truth, in our postcolonial cities, through

as the in-between or other sites (1986:24). This is a position, one might argue, that is in

where one matter cannot exist without the

opposition with that of ‘utopia’, “heterotopias in

other: !2$))$((.,):.-7!(*%$3.7/?#")$((.,):.

Foucault’s conception are real places that exist

:,%O)$((3.(!-/,7./77.,):.(!-/,7.?!!:3."%*"#.,):.

like “counter-sites”, simultaneously representing,

/77*(/!)3.7$/(*%$.,):.7,R!*%3.%$,7/"5.,):.+/-"/!)N

contesting, and inverting all other conventional

I focus particularly on Gold Reef City in Johannesburg as a site to study and explore which presents itself at the surface–the face of carousels–alongside the darker histories that produce this space: a legacy of apartheid, and the legacy of mining in Johannesburg. The project uses spatial tools from architecture, alongside tools like VR and game design to render and make visible these coexisting histories and realities, to be studied simultaneously in order to suggest alternate relations between them. Across this project

sites” (Iwan Sadrudjat 2012:29). Drawing from this concept the project argues that the ‘fourth but also acts as a “counter-site” resisting polarisation; a space for unexpected encounters and occurrences. Here, heterotopias are understood as worlds within worlds, which often operate with sophisticated spatial apparatus, including those that convey systems of illusion, suspend or subdue time, juxtapose seemingly congruent narratives, and open and close to the world it embeds itself within, with particularly managed apertures. The heterotopia produced here in this work

there is a straddling of the threshold of the ‘fourth wall’ as a supersurface that produces heterotopias.

Playspace as modality is determined beyond can be physical, virtual, or a hybrid of these

juxtapose and decode, reveal overlaps, collisions, similarities, and contradictions that I see in gold Reef City.

two settings (Walz 2010:18). This project uses an exaggerated form of a heterotopia as a didactic tool, a new way of seeing the spaces we encounter, many of which have dark hidden pasts. Moreover, the project may take on vivid dream-like fragments of the depths of the supersurface - here speaking to Gold Reef City, and Johannesburg simultaneously.

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Right: 18.01 Simulation of Game Prototype VR environment provides an embodied run-through of a visual and spatial altered landscape Below: 18.02 A-F Didactic game interface which produces new ways of interfacing with Johannesburg’s ‘truths’. A - Key Search, B - Pick Up the Shovel, C - Navigation, D - Unexpected Confrontation, E Pharmacy, F - Toxic Water.

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Contradictory Co-Equals: Virtual Heterotopia

18.03 A Disappearance Other or multiple simultaneous time existences or histories are contemplated in a series of negative-cast models

18.03 B The Archive An alternative history is contemplated in a second moulding of the original ‘copy’ which is almost, but not quite the initial positive space first cast from the plastic bricks.

18.03 C The Port Devices are thought of as ‘ports’ that meet one body and another, leveraging or transforming their relationship in some way.

18.03 D Compensation Slippages and misalignments are considered in the continued double-negative model making. Is there a third in-between mass created?

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Above: 18.04. Cities and Remains. Processes of erosion enacted in the game environment introduces revelation of smaller narrative fragments of lost people and landscapes that counter the enveloping forces of the mine dump and theme park.

Below: 18.05. Cities and Skins. Reintegration of a dark economic back story of a skin-whitening cream retailer that brought Gold Reef City into being.

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18.06. The Miners Revenge: Cities and Simulation

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19.01 The Inverted Vivarium

The Plasticene: New Beachfront Supersurfaces of Reintegrated Waste Fragments Meghana Patel , M2 199

The Plasticene: New Beachfront Supersurfaces of Reintegrated Waste Fragments

“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have

plastic pollution from a more fascinating and

now acquired a fateful power to alter and dystopia. Italo Calvino uses Lightness, in and his war against nature is inevitably a

opposition to heaviness, as a virtue when writing

war against himself? [We are] challenged as

his book, A/F.M$H!(.+!%."#$.K$F".M/77$))/*H.

mankind has never been challenged before

Thus, the representation style holds a baseline

to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of multi-disciplinary of users to access this project —Rachel Carson

and to have a more optimistic outlook on our present and future world amidst plastic. To visualise a hyperreal outcome, I will be using

This project aims to speculate the hyperreality of the next era through the traces of plastic

Durban’s Golden Mile beachfront, Funworld and surrounding sea as a microcosm.

pollution. The near reality is there will be more MacArthur Foundation 2017:12). Climate change is happening faster than our ability to reverse the damage, and we have a fastapproaching survival deadline. A new era that for the purposes of this project is term the Plasticene, will look at an alternate way to view our imminent future by taking on the form of a Supersurface. It is created by hybridising a

Left to Right: 19.02 - 04. Dupliprotista Micro Organism. Plastoscyphozoa Macro Organism. Carnianthozoa Meso Organism. Cyborg plastic and organic organisms as new likely constituents for material and ecological circuits.

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19.05. & 19.06 The vivarium is developed as a new allegorical play-park which protects new, fast-evolving organic species from humans, and humans are observed through mediating membranes surrounding the park.

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19.07. Sea Habitat The membrane acts as the boundary between the ocean levels rising and the shore, also unfurling to flexible ranges with the tides. It is comprised of layers of fluid micro plastic particles and purified Dupliprosita water, anchoring spines and bombardier balloons.

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20.01 The Picture Window Contemplation and reorganisation of the paranoia and the performativity that comes with street-facing windows. Curtains, blinds and other maneuvering architectural apertures become complicit tools in managing fear and risk.

The View Within: The Window as a Frame for Exposing Surveillance Architectures Within the Home Fathima Mula, M2 207

The View Within: The Window as a Frame for Exposing Surveillance Architectures Within the Home

This project uses the home and its architecture

The project realizes itself as a two-player

to reveal how the practice of surveillance

Orwellian cat and mouse card game, where our

penetrates even the most private of spaces.

imaginary protagonist goes missing the day after

Sited within the South African Indian household, the work uses the ‘window’ as a critical device to examine the various levels and sources of

within her home and its surroundings as to her

surveillance within domestic space, especially

last known whereabouts, while the protagonist

those which perceive the female body within the

tries to hide. The game becomes a tool to

home.

initiate awareness around surveillance practices

Beatriz Colomina likens the window to a “screen”, calling it “a viewing mechanism that produces the subject” (992:83). The work sees the window as a super-surface within space that, when interacted with, produces a particular dynamic between audience and subject. Here,

within the South African Indian home and the nuances that exist within its architectures. The project investigates the interconnectedness between watching and being watched, and how the home as one of our most private spaces – is complicit in this breach of privacy.

the window takes on many more forms and functions, which include the screen, the camera, and the mirror – to visibilise the mechanisms of power, control, and the perceived gaze as they exert themselves on the bodies in space within the home.

Below: 20.01. Digital Twin. series of works that focus on the prevalence of dataveillance within the home using smart devices and smart home technology.

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Above: 20.02. Cosmic Concealment: Patient 26. An homage to Alma Hasser, exploring duplicity of one’s physical identity into digital or virtual space, and states of discomfort, dis-figuration and polydistorted.

Below: 20.21. An Entire History of Me. Cartography of virtual remnants that the internet holds of one's identity.

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20.04. Card Game. An imaginary protagonist goes missing from the global database. The players, acting as detective and protagonist alike, try in turn to find clues within her home and it’s surroundings as to her last known whereabouts, while the protagonist tries to hide.

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Top Right 20.05 & 06. The Passthrough Window Functioning as a passage for food from server to served, the pass through window also frames a 'spectacle of labour' of those working in the kitchen. A readjustment of the stage reverses the positions of power and labour, with the woman and man taking on the roles of spectator and spectacle alike.

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Bottom Right. 20.07 & 08. The Mirror Selfie The mirror, camera, screen: these 'windows' are haunted by notions of the 'ideal body' from society and social media, and becomes a gauge of self-worth. The subject tries to reach this ideal through the use of digital and physical alterations, framing these windows as devices of constant (self-inflicted) social surveillance.

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legality, thresholds, surveillance, veiling, agency, boundaries Atiyyah, Gila, Ivan

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21.01 Jali This piece re-imagines systems of purdah and seclusion through the architectural or decorative typology of the ‘jali’ which is normally used to separate women from men. Within the exploration, parts of the Masjid Maryamin in Durban are inserted and removed in a play of visibility, invisibly exterior and interior decoration and structure.

Hyper-Unveiling: Unmasking the Agency of the Veil in Public Spaces Atiyyah Ameen, M2 215

Hyper-Unveiling: Unmasking the Agency of the Veil in Public Spaces

The Hyper-Unveiling uncovers and dissects

and visibilities of both space and the bodies

the agency of the veil within public spaces,

within it. This architectural study, along with

especially in how it is enacted on the female-

the study of the female-gendered positioning,

identifying body. The project speaks through

identity and stereotypes have been addressed

the multiplicity of the veil in literal and abstract

in several acts and narratives.

as its specimen. The explorations dealt with and studied allow for the understanding and deconstruction of so-called ‘feminine dress wear’, cultural stereotypes, political manipulations, and ideologies to eventually be redrafted.

This project draws on the notions of architectural apertures and designs along with purdah, and other architectural and feminine dress wear and manners related to the female body and concept of veiling. The project proposes new forms towards the presentation

A H,(#%/R/5, is an ancient architectural element which acts as a screening device for separation

represent and empower the image of the

of the male and female character, aids in

female body in public space in slightly new ways.

ventilating space. This wooden lattice design has been co-opted for reconstruction throughout chosen site through its apertures, porosities

21.02. Elements of Architectural Purdah (A). Unpackings of a heritage mosque in Durban to reveal points of veiling and unveiling through preservation, redistribution, locality, structure, and purpose.

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21.03. Above: Elements of Architectural Purdah (B).

Mappings of thresholds, skins and surfaces at

the Masjid Maryam in Durban, once converted from a Catholic church, but also the first mosque in South Africa named after a woman, Mother Mary. 21.04. Below: A Woman’s Voice Cannot be Veiled. Choreographic mapping of the French Hijab Ban (2019) protests in Paris.

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Hyper-Unveiling: Unmasking the Agency of the Veil in Public Spaces

Above: 21.05. Adorning the Niqaab

Left: 21.06. Crevice

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21.07.The Chamber As a threshold dividing two distinct spaces, this tapestry wraps and translates architectural elements drawing but diverging from the Masjid Maryam to produce a new embodied dress wear that narrates a new defined keyhole, and reinterpretation into the illusions of control, power and separation.

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22.01 Watching the Watchers (Film Still). Surveillance cameras in northern Johannesburg are portrayed in 'first person' and centred as the onlooking protagonists mediating the narrative of streetlife in unsettling ways.

Surveillance Supersurfaces: An Exposure and Repositioning of Power of Surveillance in Space Gila Abrams, M2 221

Surveillance Supersurfaces: An Exposure and Repositioning of Power of Surveillance in Space

“[W]ith Surveillance, the subject of the gaze is at a disadvantage and is often unaware of when [s]he is being watched, and thus the distribution of power is asymmetric” —Mann and Ferenbok (2013: 19)

Surveillance has become a regular part of contemporary daily life, from the camera our actions and movements are constantly monitored and recorded. We live in a world whether you are being recorded or not, but rather how one might respond and react to surveillance. This project examines the power of surveillance and how one may be read or seen through its lens in the context of the hyper-surveilled city of Johannesburg. It unpacks how surveillance may be understood as a tool of power in architecture, and where screens become intermediary surfaces that adjust and sometimes vilify identities of particular bodies in our cities. Taking on the landscape of surveillance in Johannesburg— its CCTV cameras and control security guards and neighbourhood-watch WhatsApp groups— as the protagonists within a of events and agents within the city, the project and built-in political positioning - and aims to expose it. The work reacts to and protests against the way surveillance has controlled the way one moves in space, and how one is perceived through surveillance.

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22.02 Choreography of a Controlled Space. Co-opted looking, hearing

and

circulating devices and their territoties, used for localised 'risk management'.

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22.03. Agents of Daily Surveillance

22.04. Watchers and the Watched at Pick n Pay Musgrave Centre

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22.05. Labyrinths and Agents of Surveillance at OR Thambo Airport

22.06. Watchers and the Watched at Suncoast Casino Durban

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Above: 22.07. How to Become Invisible in a Picture #3 Through Disguise. Off-the-grid, encrypted MESH nodes deployed from flat pack systems hidden in the streetscape to provide separate network when networks are scrambeld with by the state, for example during mass protests.

22.08. How to Become Invisible by Merging into a World of Images - Blind.spot Open access ATMs to an archive of surveilled people, in which you can confront your own surveilled self privately, but can also insert, merge and alter your own recorded presences with identities of others to produce hyperreal ghostly 'others' as place-holders.

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22.09. Deployed 'Blind Spot' device.

22.10. How to Become Invisible #1 - Block the View.

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23.01. Sonic Instruments for the Dispossessed Measurements of sonic 'claims' of space, through participating, emitting and reflecting surfaces at De Beer St, Braamfontein.

Sonic Supersurfaces: Spatial and Legal Thresholds to Noise and Silence Ivan Meyer, M2 229

Sonic Supersurfaces: Spatial and Legal Thresholds to Noise and Silence

In the detection and production of sound in spatial environments, this project argues that the spatial occupation of sound has the ability

which are not always followed by sound wave

to be ‘claimed’ or ‘rejected’ as a kind of territory.

behaviour. This means that sound, although

This project focuses on the sounds produced

‘abstract’, is in fact governed by surfaces,

in urban environments and is fascinated by the abstract and ephemeral characteristic it takes

will attempt to illustrate that those rights to

on in ‘open’ settings. The legal framework which

silence, or conversely, to the reception of noise,

governs sound rights inadvertently produces

are governed by factors that are not always accounted for in legislation —the rights to

spaces come to be characterised by. The

be ‘listened to’ or overheard might stand in

project studies Johannesburg through the

contrast with the rights to privacy.

Environmental Conservation Act 73 of 1989 to illustrate the impossibility of actually legally managing sound. Sound goes beyond clearcut lines of regulatable borders or edges. The project demonstrates that although sound ‘bleeds’ (occupying air and space in a dynamic

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Above: 23.03. Sound Manifestations Wearable haptic to sonic translation device developed combining vinyl and CD technology. Below: 23.04. Territory and Sound Map - Nightime Series Allocation of programme and Left: 23.02. Sound territory of the adhan in a suppresed sonic landscape of Greenside, Jhb

property compartmentalization become irrelevant and transgressed by the behaviour of sound in an urban area.

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Sonic Supersurfaces: Spatial and Legal Thresholds to Noise and Silence

23.05. Protest Instruments Deployable devices which attach to various urban settings, and create provision for temporary 'sound occupations' where restrictions might apply.

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Above:: 23.06. Sonic measurements of deployed sound prototype in normally 'quiet' and sonically restricted areas.

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bodies, landscapes, territories, toxicity, residues

Siwe, Mpho, Sharmaine, Simphiwe, Ntokomalo

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24.01. Mothering is a Labour of the Country Scene 2 - Uhlelo lwaNina Emzini / The Choreography of Homelife

Imbokodo, Unina

Siwelile Mathenjwa, M2 237

Imbokodo, Unina

;HR!O!:!.translates into English as R!*7:$%, ',%%/!%UN.Yet, the

At an urban scaleI frame the idea of "passage" as as a thoroughfare space, through which the

strikethrough of this word in the title is to signify

Mother must traverse: the passage that takes

the abandonment of an African patriarchal

her further and further away from home.

normalized state of being. The word *)/),, H!"#$%U3 is inserted additionally, to a means of visualisation, and a way of imagining Erin Boyer and Caitlyn Malone, is not apart from mother, "Motherhood isn’t honoured or praised, but rather it is seen as an obligatory duty the woman must perform...mother and woman is not deemed separate." Across this project, scale is employed as a structuring device to demonstrate states of mothering enacted and visualised through new imaginings and passages. Scalar portrayals of mothering include: the scale of the body, of a mother in relation to that of a child (1:1), and also that of the home (1:100), the city (1:10 000), and nation (1:1 000 000). As a result of Apartheid spatial planning, black mothers are disproportionately dislocated from child, from home, from community and larger scales of belonging.

infrastructures of care to the existing states of mothering and labours of care and servitude as performed by the working black woman who has to provide at a distance. This body of work focuses on the women who a thoroughfare space bustling with trade and commuters in the inner city of Durban. The project deploys the passage as a gaze and entry point to this subject, and constructs performative exposures to the often silent predicament of the domestic worker, and other black female labourers, in South Africa. The passage, a seemingly overlooked juncture, highlights black women in servitude in South Africa and through this awareness, the project redresses misrepresentations of the black mother.

24.02. Portable Breastmilk Bank

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24.03. Film Still: Esitobini Esimbovana - Umpompi Wobisi/The Pink Bus Stop - Breast Milk Communal Tap. In this series, several speculative pieces are developed which reimagine spaces of waiting or labour along a mother’s passage into the city, so that her labours might be made more comfortable, or visible.

24.04. Uhlelo lwaNina Emzini The Choreography of Homelife. The subsitution of mothering by other community members who help to raise children in the absence of a black mother at home.

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Imbokodo, Unina

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24.05. Mothering is a Labour of the City: Uhambo laNina/The Mother’s Journey.

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Imbokodo, Unina

24.06. iSakhiwo Somhumbe Esithungiwe/A Sewn Architecture of Passage. A prototype for a new way of seeing and contemplating spaces and passages of black women and black mothers in post-colonial cities.

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age 44 of 50

Mothering an Architecture of Passage Scale: 1:1 Buyela emzimbeni , Buyela Ekhaya. back to body , back to home.

Above and Top Left: 24.07. & 24.08. Scale: 1:1: Buyela Emzimbeni, Buyela Ekhaya/Back to Body, Back to Home. A one-to-one 'care' passage-room is speculated, that can attach to various spaces and buildings in the city as a prostethic appendage, where black woman and child can co-exist.

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25.01. Edendale’s Mining Anthropocene A Section in Time, Geology, and Poltical Regime.

Ecological Devices: Cyborg Contaminant Assemblages Held in Black Bodies and Black Landscapes Mpho Molaoa, M2 245

Ecological Devices: Cyborg Contaminant Assemblages Held in Black Bodies and Black Landscapes

of the Anthropocene, it is excluded from the wealth of its accumulation. Rather,

the organic gathering of multispecies, whose

Blackness must absorb the excess of

diverse encounters produce a multilayered

that surplus as toxicity, pollution, and

ecosystem that is new, and productive new spatial imaginaries that deserve study and design occupation.

Edendale’s lead mining past still haunts its surrounding social and ecological environment and surfaces. This has largely been rendered detectable through spatial frames in the local water, soil, and air of the present-day adjacent township of Mamelodi. As a result, the work contamination, mutation, economic progress, of Mamelodi. Through the perspective of the interrelations of waste, economic production, ecology, and community, the work will both

The project will consist of a series of prototype devices that analyze the existing social and ecological hauntings through an allegorical infrastructures. Prompted by anthropocentric spatial analysis, I aimed to produce a cyborgian gallery that intends to unearth and archive the connections between uneven geographies of social injustice and environmental degradation, bodies from the contaminants expelled from geographies of extraction.

centrally reveal the contaminants absorbed by

The project is intrigued by structures of

the varying bodies inhabiting this community,

power within mining which are simultaneously

and will propose an approach for remediation.

historic and contemporary, through revealing

Anna Tsing’s search for new forms of interacting

the erasure, alteration, and mutation of the

assemblages is extrapolated as a spatial

ecological surface within the mining site of

experience for the purposes of this work: “New

Edendale. This is done by scale changes, new

developments in ecology make it possible to

adjacencies, and collections of ecological truths.

species interactions and disturbance histories. In this time of diminished expectations, I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without

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Main Attractions. Patel, M. Unit 18. 2021.

Above: 25.03. Contaminant Separation Through Pigment Absorbtion. Below: 25.04. Contaminant Separation Visualisation. Ecological Device - Water/ Mezzo Scale/ Body Contact.

Main Attractions. Patel, M. Unit 18. 2021. 25.02. Mutation of Kareeboom Flora in the Edendale Mine Vicinity.

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Ecological Devices: Cyborg Contaminant Assemblages Held in Black Bodies and Black Landscapes

Watching the Watchers. Abrams, G. Unit 18. 2021.

Above: 25.03. Microscopic Collage, Collision and Re-assemblage: Deconstruction of

the Micro Surface

Right: 25.04. Exploitation and Reconstitution of the LungIntersection of bodily and trade-route x-ray to depict flows of migrant labour, and contamination of land, seas and bodies through processes of colonialism. Left: 25.05. Scarring of Exploitation Registration of protest against surfaces of extraction through the Marikana Massacre of 2012 and the 1946 African Mineworkers Strike.

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Ecological Devices: Cyborg Contaminant Assemblages Held in Black Bodies and Black Landscapes

Left: 25.06. Cyborg Silos New registration devices for toxicity and intersection of remediation surfaces for various species and chemicals. Top Right: 25.07. Cyborg Surfacing Maneuvres Choreographical experimentation, collision and production of new cyborg assemblages and presences. Bottom Right 25.08. Cyborg Calendar Under seasonal rotation of agricultural practice, new cyborg assemblages form.

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26.01. Displaced Memories

Omissive Architect[ures]: Exposing the illusion of gentrification in PostApartheid South Africa Sharmaine Mango, M1 253

Johannesburg co-opts surfaces as devices that

26.02.

conceal, erase, or distort inconvenient truths.

Holograms of Toxicity (a).

This is registered in its architecture, but also its messaging systems, particularly in the use of the developer’s render. The project takes on the

Speculating new, augmented 'thick façades' that fold together surfacings of harmful health effects brought on from the process of building and building materials, as well as those of diamond mining, to which the earlier history of this site has ties.

Jewel City area particularly, which has developed sophisticated forms of hyperreal image-making of how it ‘wishes to be seen’, as a set of spaces. Words such as ‘inclusive’ and ‘diversity’ are borrowed by developers as marketing strategies, realisation. Architecture and its connected territory (including the land on which it might sit) are understood here as historical vessels, which, dark legacies of extractive labour and violence at the service of the colonial empire or apartheid state. These are not present in the current visible surfaces of this context. the work takes the form of a book of archives, unpacking and analysing surface, concealment, revisits the area’s haunting past of diamond and gold mining, and more recent violent processes of displacement of certain bodies for the cause of a sanitised and ‘attractive’ environment. In its culmination, the project proposes a set of spectral renders, which hack this representational form and fold into view spatial, social, and political realities that had been erased from view. For a moment, it reclaims surfaces possible of distortion and transforms them to project places of increased layering of critical meaning and knowledge.

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26.03. Degrees of Extraction (Animation Still) Slow, fine etching and erasing processes are employed to the surface of the drawing while contemplating the extended labours of diamond mineworkers. A soundscape of chipping, stepping and coughing are juxtaposed with the formation of the cartography.

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26.04. Holograms of Toxicity (b).

26.05. Communication Through Footwear. Recalling altered forms of communication and resonance during highly inhumane suppressive

legal, labour, and monitored movement systems for people of colour in Johannesburg.

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27.01. The Berlin Conference Seat at the Table Sequence Drawing A choreography of consumption of a meal and the discipline and indulgence of that process used as a translation of the Scramble for Africa by European powers. The dinner table surface becomes a site for negotiation, shifting of resources and eventual consumption.

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The Inverted Vivarium. Patel, M. Unit 18. 2021.

Ukhuqhekeka: Terraforms of the Black Surface Simphiwe Mlambo, M1 259

Kwachekeka: Terraforms of the Black Surface

The project is a counter map of prototypes

This, along with tracing the narrative of The

(terraform apparatus) that addresses spatial

looting event of July 2021, a movement that

themes of territory and identity, and how the

will be used as a portal, that forms the stage

term Black is weaponized by coloniality as a

for my major design project to challenge the

device for to render the surface of anything it is applied to as a super surface of inherited

(The Berlin Conference) to temporarily rupture

states and structures of violence and anxiety,

the perpetual hold on the agency of African

that dispossess the African body of its agency,

territories and bodies to disrupt the lens of

and situates itself in the juxtaposing timelines

the archive, and speculate new methodologies

of The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, and the

of reading and drawing African territories, by

Looting event of July 2021, in South Africa.

shifting and reimagining current methodologies

The work begins with in-depth research of

of language, mapping, and performance.

memorial sites of the Black namely the body of

The prototype will draw on narrative and

the black female and the Apartheid legislation

language where Sharpe argues that “blackness

act (Population registration act) to uncover the

is, anagrammatically. That is, we can see the

visibly invisible systems and surfaces that hold

moments when blackness opens up into

bonds of trauma and violence, under-standing

the anagrammatically in the literal sense as

performance and language as second skins

when ‘a word, phrase, or name is formed by

of space, which are subjugated to forms of

rearranging the letters of another”( Sharpe

continued resistance and manipulation across

2018: 144) and use the sense as prompts for

time, evidencing the role the constructs of Black

recollection, through material studies as a set of

plays in copsing the bodies and environments

experiments transposed into physical methods

which they occupy within the dichotomy of

of performance.

colonial and contemporary South Africa.

27.02. Pigment Study of the Black Surface: A Rate of Transfer.

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27.03. Umemulo : The Coming of Age Of The Black Female Body (Film Still). Performance piece which registers concepts of the limits of weight, elasticity, yielding and restriction on a covering membrane, existing just to the exterior of the black skin.

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Above: 27.04. Cartography Index of the Black Surface and Its Quaking. An allegorical series of spatial transitions held through a choreographed event. Under spatial guises borrowed from those used by colonists, subversive alternate loopholes for new 'streams of looting' can be constituted back into the favour of black and indigenous agents. Left: 27.05. National Scale Subregion Map. 27.06. Body Earthquake Study. These elements, part of an extended countermapping, produce alternative topographies of value and black ownership.

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28.01. Monument in Conservation Speculated altered figures and place for commemoration.

Unveiling the Surface of Memory Ntokomalo Mzoneli, M1 265

Unveiling the Surface of Memory

This work takes on lasting signals of power

These walls include various subtle provisions

and the iconic produced through materiality

of care for the ordinary processes of citizens

and resemblance. Statues and street-naming

using this public space, a generosity not

are narrated in new, rewrapped and altered extended gazes and functions of people that use names and bodies of particular people to

transverse or sit in the area, the panels also

‘hold space’ and ‘hold power’ for long periods

begin to hide the view of Queen Victoria — for

of time in important points in our cities. Statues

a moment she ‘disappears’ as one glances at

enlarge bodies that are or were in fact small and transient, compared with the legacies of empire or state they portray. This is studied particularly in the context of Durban city

might begin to attract a kind of power in their

centre, with other adjacent sites of historical of the ordinary. also featuring. Various important people are ‘collected’ according to nation states; they are remade and repositioned into a ‘political by an archival mapping of the extents of their ‘dominion’ through time. This collection exploits miniaturisation and material surfacing and restructuring as tactics to suggest altered status and closer relation to corporality and mortality. There is a larger commentary about the agency of memory in architecture, monuments and the making of other vessels of remembrance counter-actions towards memorialisation, especially to those of colonial origin. The project’s culmination focuses on the statue of Queen Victoria that currently resides outside the Durban City Hall - where a speculative urban proposition is placed to be in conversation with the statue. Three tactics, which include deployed with the introduction of a series of gestural mirror-coated walls which are positioned next to and behind the statue.

Right: 28.03. Material and Positional Solidifcication and Signaling of Empire and its Figures in Durban CBD through Statues, Colonial Architecture and Street Naming. Above: 28.02. Queen Victoria’s Miniature Sample from a series of re-made miniatures of existing statues found in the Durban CBD. In their scale translations, they also acquire new surface materialities that are more fragile, transparent, and ephemeral.

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Unveiling the Surface of Memory

Right & Below: 28.04 & 28.05 The Bench and Mirror In a move to de-centre the iconic, a series of new reflective surface panels are speculated to sit adjacent to existing statues or colonial 'signatures' in this landscape.

certain viewpoints, such figures 'disappear' and we see, rather, reflections of everyday people going about their business in this part of Durban CBD. Wrapped into this proposal is the additional provision of various infrastructural urban devices to subtly support public life.

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images, screens, false realities, consumption, desire Mutaleni, Tania, Liam, Thembi, Ashendran

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29.01. Scaling Mannequin (Animation Still) Occupying, projecting and realising the gap between 'beauty ideals' of 'unreal' physical shopfront mannequins and more relational 'other' body types.

Surfaces of HyperInfluence In Consumerism: from The Physical to The Virtual Realm Mutaleni ya Toivo, M1 273

Surfaces of Hyper-Influence In Consumerism: from the Physical to The Virtual Realm

In a rapidly increasing retreat into virtual worlds,

produced in this work centre on experiences

owing to COVID-19 and the development of

of consumerism and leisure. Drawn mostly in

technology, much of our time is spent navigating

immersive experiential 3-dimensional videos,

information and material in this way. It has

one might begin to contemplate the strange

called for a greater emphasis and attention to

possible evolution and possibilities of spatial

developing digital encounters, while dramatically

experience in this virtual world, and our physical

reducing face-to-face human engagement.

bodies in relation to this. The project also inserts

This work argues that architects have a critical

a countering strategy to respond to a deepening

space to occupy in thinking through these

worry toward the overwhelming nature of this

newly developing modes of being. This work

experience, through the implementation of new ‘rest spaces’. These play out as disruptions

passage through digital space, to both narrate

or designed glitch spaces which recall, for a

the remnants of physical spatialities that might

moment, our embodied linkage to the physical world, by enacting awareness through our other

the viability and implicated dangers of this

senses.

increasing extreme experience. spatial states of being which have digital ‘Wish-Image Shopfronts’, ‘Transitional Flight’, Corridors’ for instance, the experience of scrolling in an endless loop through Instagram or Facebook might have physical ancestral linkages to the mall typology. The frames

Opposite Above: 29.02. Corridors (Animation Still)

Opposite Below: 29.03. Wish-Image Shopfront (Animation Still) Physical shopfronts are interfaces in which you see your body, and sometimes its reflection, in relation to a mannequin wearing an item seen through a glass threshold. What if the projection of one's image merged within the world of virtual experience to widen the imagination of alternate and other 'fits'?

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Surfaces of Hyper-Influence In Consumerism: from the Physical to The Virtual Realm

29.04. Transitional Flight (Animation Still) Various explorations are conducted to suggest ways in which physical space, and how we have moved through it, have informed digital experiences of scrolling, sliding, clicking and transitioning 'through virtual space'. In this series, the ability to hyper-link, click away, and interchange between various apps and interest points is questioned through a virtual translation and scaling up of the 'clicking' and 'sliding' thumbaction of a virtual body.

Left: 29.05. Scaling Mannequin (Animation Still) Right: 29.06. Excerpt from Sites and Thresholds of Influence Study

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30.01. Crowning Moment & Fewness Studies on the production of 'aspiration graphics' and architecture's complicity in building this in advertising flyers for a leisure space.

Digital Rule Book: Images of False Realities Tania Verburg, M1 279

Digital Rule Book: Images of False Realities

“The built environment turns into an

types of screens as surfaces and what their

attraction, populated not by citizens,

impact is on space. Various sites were unpacked

but rather by users who feel the need to are in the creation of this super surface. In disappears under the lack of agency and

the process of deconstructing these super

collective use, becoming a stage on which

strange fake-surfaces, I also, at times, take on speculative methods to suggest either new ways of seeing these worlds, or the new worlds they

-Giulia Pistone & Fabiola Fiocco

seek to project. The project is for the moment screens particularly as sites for exploration and discovery.

authenticity is built in these spaces, which seem to draw from real, physical environments, but produce new hyperreal atmospheres of desire, comfort or familiarity. I explore the meaning of space in the production of are experienced through and for the screen as an agent to suspend disbelief. Numerous

Below: 30.02. Carouse II. Questioning how sites of historical trauma become backdrops for some people's curated social media presences - contributing towards the blasé and spatial denial or dislocation of actual meaning.

280

Right: 30.03. Stage III & Stadium III. De-constructing images which proliferate concerning certain architectural landmarks, to consider how such architectures might, in some cases, be designed for how it might be seen on a screen or in an image, and less so much how it actually works in real life.

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Digital Rule Book: Images of False Realities

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30.04. Continuities and Discontinuties of Islamabad Architectural tactics for suspending disbelief, as de-constructed in 'Homeland' Season 04 (2014) that was filmed in Cape Town while fictionally portraying scenes of Islamabad.

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Left: 31.01. KFC Physical & Social 'Facade' (and their support structure) system abstraction. Below: 31.02 A-C Prototyping the Proliferation of Global Template 3D printed and scanned iterations

Unmasking KFC: Investigating Speculative Realities Liam Wepener, M1 285

Unmasking KFC: Investigating Speculative Realities

This proposal investigates speculative realities of sites of consumption in post-colonial cities, particularly those emboldened through fast food franchises. This is done through a process of collage, digital and hand-built model mimicry to analytically de-construct and then re-imagine what this project claims as ‘supersurfaces’ of high consumption or extraction. The work also deliberately employs processes of collation and layering of ‘data’ visualisations over unassuming architectural moves have masscities. The new visibilities of these forces at play are relayed and antagonised through the use of irony, narrative and satire. The research and speculative response is undertaken in spaces embedded in Johannesburg, Krugersdorp design project aims to investigate Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) as a well-established and mass capitalism and globalisation. The project manipulation and strategic adjustment meant to exploit consumers.

Right: 31.03. Facade Mimicry Modelling 'Distillation' of various physiognomies of the fastfood typology across three international locations, to trace commonalities or local divergences across Turkey, Sweden and South Africa.

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Unmasking KFC: Investigating Speculative Realities

Above: 31.04. Colour Facade Logics. Below: 31.05. Restrictive Policy. Revelation of the complicity of space, or architecture in the production of an economic machine, coded through food, health and corporate identity policy. Right: 00.00. In the deconstruction of a fast-food outlet typology, gaps and slippages are identified where new tactics which counter the strategy of manipulation and extraction are speculated. These are held in new programmes and infrastructures of care which latch onto, under and within this building typology.

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289

290

32.01. Obfuscation Early experiment with mirror and systems of masking and looking.

Without Origin: A Gallery of Simulacrum

Thembalihle Basi, M1 291

Without Origin: A Gallery of Simulacrum

This project is centred on ideas of identity,

meaningless. This is antagonised through

imitation and mimicry in architecture and the

methods which dramatize illusion, through

transition from an original to a copy. It makes

the use of altered frame or perspective. These

reference to Jean Baudrillard’s A/H*7,-%,.,):.

methodologies allow superimposition of what

A/H*7,"/!).(1981) as well as Rem Koolhaas’ V*)O.A2,-$ (2013) in the explorations of the

level with what is beneath the surface. Brought

relationship between original and copy and how

to the fore, we might also see some of the

they operate in society. The project interrogated

darker inner workings that support or foster

replication, including Miniland (Johannesburg)

or façades that invite trust, familiarity and

and Minitown (Durban), the Montecasino

desire are held next to related narrations of

gambling complex in Johannesburg, and a so-

consumption traps, and processes of capitalism

called township-themed tourist accommodation

and globalisation.

stop in Bloemfontein, among others. The work traces a passage of informants from other times the cities we occupy, to consider relevancy and absurdity of these elements which hybridise local spaces with the global, universal, and

Below: 32.02. Tunnel Vision. Looking at one thing through or in relation to another makes its illusory integrity questionable. Right: 32.03. Scenes of Division. Collage drawing from Mbembe's 'The Aesthetics of Superfluity' (2004) to talk through spatial devices which order division, and conceal or produce illusory systems to inconvenient truths on both ends of the spectrum. In both instances, processes of layering, juxtaposition and layering become useful tactics in the project.

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Without Origin: A Gallery of Simulacrum

Above & Left 32.04 - 32.06. Simulacrum Gallery. If the walls of Montecasino are just 'window dressing' devices, what if we used them for truthtelling modes towards how architectural and heterotopic systems of illusions might work? Right: 32.07. Illusion Deconstruction Site. Rather than a site apparently in a 'stable state' that lends itself as an aspirational but illusory backdrop, the site is reconstructed as one that is dynamic, unstable and constantly in the state of remaking itself. A new iteration or copy is made, but with slight alterations and insurgencies included in its new constituency.

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Left (Upper) 33.01 Durban - Drive-Through Aspirational Supersurface Investigation into how signs, surfaces and buildings consider producing a kind of 'grand narrative' of the city, experienced while in transition between spaces. Left (Lower) 33.02. Below the Supersurface At times, there are marginalised narratives that exist but go unseen. They hold up the first image of the city.

Productive Surfaces Ashendran Kuppan, M1 297

Productive Surfaces

This project considers surfaces, edges and

new surfaces for the precinct that centralises

margins that exist along movement routes

an urban farm. The proposed scheme outlines

within the Durban CBD. In early spatial

spaces for integrated farming that is to exist in tandem with selling spaces, storage space and

‘hyper-aesthetics’ that present themselves along

also space for traders to sell fresh produce to

the Durban N2 highway. As a hyper-visible

commuters. The project looks to suggest spatial

stretch of surfaces that face a continuous

notions of inclusivity, participation, assemblage and collaboration.

is considered and there is a level of care, control and economisation that plays out as various visible spaces compete for attractive visibility. Landmarks and infrastructure developed for the 2010 FIFA World Cup also play a role. But another set of narratives is not visible here, particularly in terms of the labour force that under-resourced spaces that many must endure as as those in which to work and traverse. In Italo Calvino’s ‘Cities & Signs’ category within the city of Tamara as follows: ‘The eye does not see things but the images of things that mean other things’ (Calvino 1972). If an architectural surface might become an ‘image of a thing that means other things’, what do these hyperaesthetic surfaces of Durban mean? Can they do less work in upholding wishful images of the city, and do more for actually providing for those ‘on the ground’ and ‘behind the scenes’? In a later part of the work, the project assumes a site at Bulwer by people and goods from a variety of origin points. The project studies existing edges and surfaces that face the site and it also proposes

298

33.03 Sketch Series - Edge Conditions at Bulwer Park Study for interrelation and support to existing programmes, functions and character.

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Acknowledgements The research endeavours of this Unit have not been undertaken in isolation and we wish to thank our friends and families for their support, as well as some key collaborators over this year: The GSA Unit 18 Class of 2020 for their contributed content; including: Atiyyah Ameen, Fathima Mula, Gila Abrams, Gloria Pavita, Izak Potgieter, Jana Crous, Jessica Cristovao, Kamal Ranchod, Karabo Moumakwe, Leo Da Silva Chicwambi, Natalie Harper, Meghana Patel, Mpho Molaoa, Nothando Lunga, Siwelile Mathenjwa, Thelma Ndebele, Zahraa Essa. The GSA Unit 18 Class of 2021 for their contributed content; including: Atiyyah Ameen, Fathima Mula, Gila Abrams, Meghana Patel, Mpho Molaoa, Siwelile Mathenjwa, Demi Bridgland, Tania Verburg, Mutaleni Ya Toivo, Liam Wepener, Thembalihle Basi, Sharmaine Mango, Ntokomalo Mzoneli, Simphiwe Mlambo, Ashendran Kuppan, Ivan Meyer. The Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg for its financial and

The contributing writers to this book: Dr Denise Lim (Yale & Stanford University) , Endriana Audisho (University of Technology Sydney), Dr Sara Salem (London School of Economics). The GSA Unit 18 tutor body, including: Dr Huda Tayob (Unit Leader 2020) , Naadira Patel (Unit Leader 2021, Unit Tutor 2020), Sarah de Villiers (Unit Leader 2020, 2021), Adam Osman (Unit Assistant 2020), Nothando Lunga (Unit Alumni and Unit Assistant 2021). 2020 GSA Unit 13 leaders Eric Wright and Claudia Morgado, and GSA Unit 13 Tutor Mikara Naidoo for their collaboration in the Dialogues with Dust Online Marathon of April 2020, as well as all our participants and contributors including: Dr. Tegan Bristow (Wits, Fak’ugesi - JHB) , Dr. Haytham Nawar (AUC, Cairotronica - Cairo), Tova Lubinsky (UTS - Sydney), Endriana Audisho (UTS - Sydney), Dr. Dale Kitchin (NICD - JHB), Dr. Ashley Kruger (Swedish Royal Museum of Natural History Stockholm), Bongani Kona (Chimurenga - Cape Town), Dr. Aya Nassar (Durham - UK), Naadira Patel (WSOA - JHB), Sara Salem (LSE, London / Cairo), Joseph Grima (Design Academy Eindhoven & Space Caviar - Milan), Heidi Lu, Frederick Kannemeyer (JHB), Prof. Elke Krasny (Vienna), Dr. Bihter Almaç (ITU - Istanbul), Zara Julius (JHB), Kgao

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Bonaventure Mashego (JHB), Philip Astley (UCL - London), Prof. Jasper Knight (Wits JHB), Prof. Paulo Tavares (UB - Brasilia), Chris Rojas (JHB), Nina Barnett (JHB) & Jeremy Bolen (Atlanta), Prof. Lori A. Brown (AIA, New York), Sumayya Vally (Counterspace & GSA UJ Unit12R - JHB), Patti Anahory (Cape Verde), Dr. Thandi Loewenson (RCA, London), Dr. David Roberts (Bartlett, UCL, London), Thi Phuong-Trâm (Montreal, Canada), Thelma Ndebele / @DormantYouth (JHB). 18+ Series contributors 2020: Gugulethu Mthembu, Jesse Diamond, Tristan Mclaren, Jiaxin Gong, James Howard, Bongani Kona, Zaheer Cassim, Moeketsi Phori, Sabine Waskow, Sumayya Mohamed, Steven Moore, Frederick Kannemeyer, Darren Sampson, Israel Ogundare, Freya Alston, Tonia Murray, Lesego Batsheng, Heidi Lu. 18+ Series contributors 2021: Dr Zach Blas, Izak Potgieter, Jose Ignacio Martin, Doung Jahangeer, Roanne Moodley, Lindsay Bush, Ricardo Reboredo, Ayesha Mukadam, Kasthuri Naidoo, Zen Marie, Jenna Bass, Jesse Dymond. Visiting critics and advisors to the Unit 2020: Fouad Asfour, Gugulethu Mthembu, Jiaxing Gong, Kirsten Doermann, Naadira PAtel, Natalie Paneng, Adwoa Agyei, Nabeel Essa, Bongani Kona, Zen MArie, Rahesh Ram, Dr MArk Raymond, Sara Salem, Manijeh Verghese, Sarah Treherne, Anna Abengowe, Dr Aya Nassar, Sumayya Vally, Ilze Wolff, Dr Haytham Nawar, Patti Anahory, Dr Peter Hasdell, Tova Lubinksy, Muhammad Dawjee, Craig Mclenaghan, Dr David Roberts, Dr Denise Lim, Prof Finzi Saidi, Prof Lesley Lokko, Dr Mark Raymond, Meghan Ho-Tong, Dr Thandi Loewenson. Visiting critics and advisors to the Unit 2021: Jiaxing Gong, Kirsten Doermann, Naadira Patel, Nabeel Essa, Dr Mark Raymond, Anna Abengowe, Sumayya Vally, Ilze Wolff, Patti Anahory, Tova Lubinsky, Prof Lesley Lokko, Dr Hanneke Stuit, Dr Dee Marco, Jenna Bass, Tumi Mogorosi, Bhavisha Panchia, Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Karabo Moumakwe, Thireshen Govender, Stephen Steyn, Dr Huda Tayob, Roanne Oberholzer, Dr Mpho Matsipa, Carly Whitaker, Dorothee Kreutzveldt, Endriana Audisho, Arinjoy Sen, Mxolisi Makhubo, Khanyisile Mawhayi. Collaborating groups: GSA Unit 14 for the collaboration of the 14+ 18+ Series, Yale Department of Sociology Space, Time & the African City Course led by Dr Denise Lim (2020) for course-crossovers and to Cities Under Surveillance (led by Tova Lubinsky and Endriana Audisho) at University of Sydney for a crossover collaboration and various shared exchanges across 2020.

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Figures List Fig 1.01-09. Drawings / works by Leo Da Silva

Fig 9.01-04, Drawings / works by Gloria Pavita,

Chicwambi, 2020, excerpts from Surveillance

2020, excerpts from Home Making: An

Prototypes, GSA Unit 18, University of

Anthology of Hyperreal Cooking Preserves,

Johannesburg.

GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

Fig 2.01-07. Drawings/works by Nothando Lunga,

Fig 10.01-06 Drawings / works by Zahraa Essa,

2020, excerpts from Mnemonic Devices:

2020, excerpts from Homemade Prototypes: De-

Exposing the margin within institutional

constructing Domestic Decorum, GSA Unit 18,

spaces of power in post-apartheid South

University of Johannesburg.

Africa, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg

Fig 11.01-06 Drawings / works by Jessica Cristovao, 2020, excerpts from

Fig 3.01-07 Izak Potgieter, 2020, excerpts

Nubian

Holding Patterns: Prototypes of Spatial

from A Video Game to Operate the Form-

Resilience, GSA Unit 18, University of

Less Hyperobjects that Have Shaped the

Johannesburg.

Giza Plateau over Millennia, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

Mathenjwa, 2020, excerpts from The Black

Fig 4.01-09 Drawings / works by Kamal Ranchod, 2020, excerpts from

Hyperreal

Perspicuities: Multi-Narrative Reconstructions of Modern Egypt, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 5.01-10. Drawings / works by Fathima Mula, 2020, excerpts from The Many Sides of The Square, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 6.01-09, Drawings / works by Gila Abrams, 2020, excerpts from The Transformation of Tradition, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 7.01-07, Drawings / works by Atiyyah Ameen , 2020, excerpts from Engravings and Stitches: Tactical Mapping Against the Oppressions at the Rafah Border Fig 8.01-07, Drawings / works by Karabo Moumakwe, 2020, excerpts from The Unhomely Prototype: The ‘Seraglio’ and the Unsettling of Amina, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

304

Fig 12.01-08 Drawings / works by Siwelile Female Return, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 13.01-06 Drawings / works by Mpho Molaoa, 2020, excerpts from Cairo’s Safe Sanctuary, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 14.01-07 Drawings / works by Meghana Patel, 2020, excerpts from Industrialisation of the Home: Tools, Waste and Circularity in the Zabbaleen Community in Cairo, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 15.01-07 Drawings / works by Natalie Harper, 2020, excerpts from The Hybridized Home: Unveiling in Cairo’s Necropolis, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 16.01-10 Drawings / works by Thelma Ndebele, 2020, excerpts from Nocturnal Heterotopias: Prototyping the Event Place for Otherness, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 17.01-05 Drawings / works by Jana Crous, 2020, excerpts from Ghost stories, hauntings and afterlives of the Suez Canal in Egypt, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

Fig 19.01-06 Drawings / works by Demi Bridgland,

Fig 27.01-05 Simphiwe Mlambo, 2021, excerpts

2021, excerpts from Contradictory Co-Equals:

from Drawings / works by Kwachekeka:

Virtual Heterotopia, GSA Unit 18, University

Terraforms of the Black Surface, GSA Unit

of Johannesburg.

18, University of Johannesburg.

Fig 18.01-07 Drawings / works by Meghana Patel, 2021, excerpts from The Plasticene: New

Fig 28.01-05 Ntokomalo Mzoneli, 2021, excerpts

Beachfront Supersurfaces of Reintegrated

from Unveiling the Surface of Memory, GSA

Waste Fragments, GSA Unit 18, University of

Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

Johannesburg. Fig 20.01-08 Drawings / works by Fathima Mula,

Fig 29.01-06 Drawings / works by Mutaleni ya Toivo, 2021, excerpts from Surfaces of

2021, excerpts fromThe View Within: The

Hyper-Influence In Consumerism: from the

Window as a Frame for Exposing Surveillance

Physical to The Virtual Realm, GSA Unit 18,

Architectures Within the Home, GSA Unit 18,

University of Johannesburg.

University of Johannesburg. Fig 21.01-07 Drawings / works by Atiyyah

Fig 30.01-04 Drawings / works by Tania Verburg, 2021, excerpts from Digital Rule Book:

Ameen, 2021, excerpts fromHyper-Unveiling:

Images of False Realities, GSA Unit 18,

Unmasking the Agency of the Veil in

University of Johannesburg.

Public Spaces, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 22.01-10 Drawings / works by Gila Abrams, 2021, excerpts from Surveillance Supersurfaces: An Exposure and Repositioning of Power of Surveillance in Space, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 23.01-06 Drawings / works by Ivan Meyer, 2021, excerpts from Sonic Supersurfaces: Spatial and Legal Thresholds to Noise and Silence, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

Fig 31.01-05 Drawings / works by Liam Wepener, 2021, excerpts from Unmasking KFC: Investigating Speculative Realities, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 32.01-07 Drawings / works by Thembalihle Basi, 2021, excerpts from Without Origin: A Gallery of Simulacrum, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 33.01-03 Drawings / works by Ashendran Kuppan, 2021, excerpts from Productive Surfaces, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

Fig 24.01-08 Drawings / works by Siwelile Mathenjwa, 2021, excerpts from Imbokodo, Unina, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 25.01-08 Drawings / works by Mpho Molaoa, 2021, excerpts from Ecological Devices:Cyborg Contaminant Assemblages Held in Black Bodies and Black Landscapes, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Fig 26.01-05 Drawings / works by Sharmaine Mango, 2021, excerpts from Omissive Architect[ures]:Exposing the illusion of gentrification in Post-Apartheid South Africa, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.

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Unit18: Naadira Patel Sarah de Villiers Huda Tayob Adam Osman Nothando Lunga Essay contributions: Sara Salem Endriana Audisho Denise Lim

2020: Spectral Hauntings: Spaces of the hyperreal in post-colonial Egypt Leo Chicwambi Nothando Lunga Izak Potgieter Kamal Ranchod Fathima Mula Gila Abrams Atiyyah Ameen Karabo Moumakwe Gloria Pavita Zahraa Essa Jessica Cristovao Siwelile Mathenjwa Mpho Molaoa Meghana Patel Natalie Harper Thelma Ndebele Jana Crous

2021 Supersurfaces: Surfaces, Skins and Screens in Johannesburg and Durban Meghana Patel Demi Bridgland Fathima Mula Atiyyah Ameen Gila Abrams Ivan Meyer Siwelile Mathenjwa Mpho Molaoa Sharmaine Mango Simphiwe Mlambo Ntokomalo Mzoneli Mutaleni ya Toivo Tania Verburg Liam Wepener Thembalihle Basi Ashendran Kuppan