oNform Publication 2021: T-02

T - 02

T-02 2021

The Act of Service: THE MYTH OF VIOLENCE

Cover image by Olive Olusegun

Published by

Unit 19 of the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg, South Africa.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without the written consent of the publisher.

Graphic designer

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DADA Collective

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Editor

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Tuliza Sindi Unit 19’s oNform T-O2 The Act of Service: THE MYTH OF VIOLENCE 228pgs 19x25cm includes Acknowledgements

Unit 19

Unit System Africa Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) University of Johannesburg (UJ)

List of Current Publications

2020: Unit 19 Primer (accessible on Issuu) oNform T-01 (accessible on Issuu) 2021: Unit 19 Primer (accessible on Issuu)

Awards, honours, features & mentions

• M1 student Patricia Bandora chosen to publish an essay for Places, a journal of public scholarship on architecture, landscape and urbanism, on the theme of ‘Responsibilities’ - where she explored the historical, cultural, political, and environmental responsibilities that are embedded in the work of design.

• M1 student Patricia Bandora chosen to present in the second series of the first round of on architecture education. This series focuses on the ‘formative process: learning and teaching’. The roundtables’ panelists are students from the three organising institutions: the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign; the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina); and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (ETSA-Vallès, Spain).

• Unit 19 students featured on :her(e); otherwise platform. Co-curated by Unit 19 lead Tuliza Sindi,

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the platform invites women architects from Africa and the diaspora to probe/examine the artifacts, elements of language and modes of representation generated by institutions, as well as the myths and rituals that have founded the architectural discipline, starting at the cardinal notion of the ‘brief ’. (https://hereotherwise.space/en/; https://www. arcenreve.eu/rencontre/here-otherwise).

Unit 19 tutors and students featured in Cape Town culture magazine iLiso Ekapa issues #4 and #6.

Unit 19 featured in Architecture SA June/July 2021 magazine issue #100 (https://saia.org.za/assets/ docs/archsa/ASA_issue_100.pdf).

Examiner’s Choice - Mitchell Squire: Miliswa Ndziba Examiner’s Choice - Kate Otten: Tshwanelo Kubayi Examiner’s Choice - Emma Nsugbe: Thandeka Mnguni Corobrik 2nd Prize: Miliswa Ndziba Unit Choice: Tshwanelo Kubayi Dean’s Prize: Olive Olusegun Women in Architecture Prize: Patricia Bandora AHT Top Student: Patricia Bandora Best Student in Professional Practice: Olive Olusegun MArch Distinctions: Miliswa Ndziba BArch Hons. Distinctions: Olive Olusegun

How to reach us

Instagram: @gsa_unit19 Issuu: GSA Unit 19 Youtube: GSA Unit 19 GSA Website: www.gsa.ac.za © 2021 GSA UJ All rights reserved.

This edition of Unit 19’s oNform is dedicated to Muhammad Dawjee.

v oNform FOREWORD / 2021

FOREWORD

THERE IS NO GAZE OR HAND TO STOP YOU

by Anesu Chigariro To engage with the work of Unit 19 as a non-architect has been to wonder if it is Architecture at all. Over the past two years that I have engaged with the Unit as an external reviewer I have encountered work whose line of inquiry may appear to ask more philosophical, or sociological questions than what I understood to be Architecture [proper]. And therein lies the beauty and the expansiveness of the aims of this Unit.

In its nascent explorations, I find Unit 19 offers up decolonial moves towards freedom, as it grapples with how transgressive architectural practices can be promulgated through its space as a “liberated zone”1 within Architecture. Beyond the spectre of the colonial futures presenced through the work of Architecture – that has participated in enforcing, reinforcing and continues to mark the ways in which racialised, gendered and classed oppression operates in South Africa, and throughout the rest of the Africas2 – there exists otherwise3 architectures.

These otherwise architectures are not concerned primarily with negating Architecture; they exist outside its orbit. They form new trajectories of thought that are free from its gravitational pull, resisting Architecture’s 1 Liberated

zones were sites during African nationalist liberation struggles that were wrested from the control of colonialist settlers in places like Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, and GuineaBissau, where insurgents would form communities from which to recoup, organise, plan and launch further attacks.

2 Ann Daramola formulates the Africas, as a term to reckon, more incisively, with the totality and multiplicities of the continent of Africa, which is often flattened and denuded of variegation.

Daramola posits the Africas, the Americas and the Asias as terms that “evoke the multiple”.

3 I borrow the articulation of the “otherwise” from Keguro Macharia’s thinking on “otherwise vernaculars” as presented in “Otherwise Vernaculars: A Meditation” on 9 July 2021 for the University of Minnesota Department of English.

place as the centre of the planetary system. They begin by setting a new pace and course for their revolution[s], establishing relations with each other that constitute a new universe entirely, governed by laws that defy Architecture’s logics.

The ways in which Unit 19 employs and deploys otherwise architectures reminds me of Toni Morrison’s reflections on the community of black women that she was a part of, at time she was writing her novel Sula, which she speaks of in the book’s foreword: “Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not…unencumbered by other people’s expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves. In that atmosphere of ‘What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?’”

Through their otherwise architectures, Unit 19 chooses to cut themselves adrift. They choose to do and think as if there is no gaze or hand stopping them. As part of the academe, Unit 19 cannot say that nobody is minding them, or that they are unencumbered by other people’s expectations. They exist within the establishment. The Unit leader Tuliza Sindi noted in her ruminations on the goals of the Unit that there exists the paradox of “needing the master’s tools to function in the master’s house”. However, she boldly states that the Unit aims “…not to discard the master’s tools, but to liberate them from their political forms and to negotiate them on their own inherent terms.”

The questions that the students have asked, the altars that they have called unholy, the myths that they have contended with, and the worlds that they have imagined

and [re]membered since the Unit’s inception, have evinced this move to liberate the master’s tools. They have grappled with the frictions of the intimate and the vast, the body and ideology, the spiritual and material, weaving in family histories and personal narratives to contest power at several scales.

Their work explores and responds to the world(s) around them in ways that recognise yet refuse the sense of urgency that is produced by colonial conceptions of time.

The work does not hurry itself to resolution, knowing that in the slow tide of process and iteration, through gathering and rumination, there are traces and trails that reveal themselves once conjured to the surface.

What has surfaced in the work produced by the Unit in 2021 is both expansive and fascinating. This year the students have presented projects that are challenging, provocative and often moving. The ground that the students chose to cover, throughout the conception and workings of their projects this year recalls the title of a ground-breaking feminist text: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave4. Much of the work that you will see in this second edition of oNform transgresses what the establishment would deem to be architectural. It forges new pathways and asks us to join in the imagination of what Architecture’s future could be.

But Some of Us Are Brave.

4 All

the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave is a feminist anthology in Black Women's Studies published in 1982. It was co-edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith.

Unit 19 is for the ones... a poem by Olive Olusegun For the ones who could not hold their breath long enough when their bodies sunk to the ocean floor For the ones who gave their hearts over But instead, their bodies were explored For the ones whose mirror is the harsh world And needed to look through different lenses For the ones whose skin colour Requires no cleansing or repentance For the ones who were the roamers of the earth before we were Whose faces are not seen But whose voices are heard Through us The generation of reckless Who find restedness in uncovering what others may find senseless We build and break fences and seek no repentance

Revealing the stories others think should be left behind But we are travellers going through past present and future times We are the sojourners of valleys unknown The poets who write poems about death and violence, but really, hope For we characters of Unit 19 are the ones brave enough to confront darkness to reach into the realm beyond To look demons in their faces And not cower but scream To not run from pain But have the gall to dream Within To dream without To dream beyond Despite all your doubts You are the sojourners of the lands untraversed The makers of magic and marvel You are the ones who always glean From waters that are unclean But reach and search and scavenge for gold The silent screamers The women who are bold The men who are brave enough to be vulnerable Unit 19 makers of magic and dreams

Your lives are the unwritten stories Of those who planted but could not live to glean.

EDITOR’S NOTE / 2021

oNform

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L: Unit 19 students at Chapman Peak’s Drive on 30 April 2021.

Photo by Muhammad Dawjee.

EDITOR’S NOTE

TOWARD UNSETTLING GROUND

by Tuliza Sindi The provocation, Toward Unsettling Ground, holds an array of meanings. The prioritization of the ‘ground’ – and grounding – as the Unit’s entryway into spatial practice is an important emerging characteristic of the Unit (that will be elaborated on further), but the provocation surrounding the act of ‘unsettling’ is one that the Unit proposes as a necessary practice toward a reckoning with the disquieting reality of the consequences that come with building in and on sustained settler grounds, as is South Africa’s condition.

To give context to this write-up, I’d like to introduce a 10-min. podcast episode that I created for South African podcasting platform CliffCentral.com in June of 2017, while in the midst of several hot-button local and international political tensions. Internationally, Donald Trump had been sworn in as president of the US just 5 months before that, and nationally, we were 8 months away from a [Jacob] Zuma resignation as more information on State Capture was emerging. The podcast is structured as a forecast that traces a potential broad future for the nation of South Africa, but its subtext is about charting the extent of the scope of our role as makers of environments.

Click on the speaker symbol to play (length - 00:10:03 mins.)

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Please access the soft copy version of this publication on issuu.com/gsaunit19 to listen to the embedded podcast above that was edited specifically for this write-up.

Artwork of the thumbnail of the original podcast published on CliffCentral.com by Merve Ozaslan.

The biggest critique I have of the forecast is that the

point from which I projected a potential future for land and restitution lay within the very socio-political system that was designed to inhibit it. And it’s this dilemma that drives the Unit: the pursuit of the liberated point(s) from which to project futures; from which our futures are indeed able to be projected from; ones that are not traps or mutations of the very things we want to see beyond, but rather, ones that are grounded in more expansive possibilities of and for the world. This pursuit of other ground zeros is founded on the premise that the world as-is is an invention that can be made anew, over and over again, and that the capacity to renew it is not limited to only a select hegemonic few.

To walk you through the Unit’s pursuit of projectable grounds, we will move you through the Unit’s four scales of inquiry in our order of practice: the medium, the ideological, the urban, and the architectural.

Mediums / 1:1

The first of those scales, 1:1, is where we ask questions about medium, representation and audience, such as was done with the podcast episode, where the news report as a conceptual container was purposefully designed as the medium through which to draw these possible futures and orient them toward their relevant audiences.

We start our practice from this scale because it is also how we are able to prioritize the body (i.e., embodiment, living memory, experience, etc.) as the medium through which the Unit’s ideological inquiries evidence themselves, as French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1973) articulates the programming of the body as one of the fundamental consequences of ideological materialization (Mauss, 1973).

The Unit has sometimes unknowingly afforded students an experience of catharsis, which is described metaphorically in Aristotle’s dramatic theory as the purification and purgation of emotions – particularly pity and fear – through a creative process or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration of the body (catharsis, 2018). This is the important part, as French writer Karim Kattan (2001) articulates how colonization excises the territory, amputates our imagination and our relationship to time and space (Kattan, 2001), which has us pinned down under the weight of stagnated creative energy that requires renewal.

When starting one’s inquiry from the body, one is able to firstly believe themselves, which is a profoundly revolutionary act for those of historically marginalized groups, and then mine the conditions that colonize their senses and imaginations. To do this, we inquire within the immediate spaces that are familiar, and not as objectifying and distant researchers, but as intimate participants and witnesses whose lives need no longer be separate from the research. Bell Hooks (1994) says of this in Teaching to Transgress that “to call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has been handed down to us by our professional elders…” (Hooks, 1994), because “the public world of institutional learning was a site where the body had to be erased, go unnoticed” (Hooks, 1994), which is rooted in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism that believes in a split between the body and the mind.

For groups of people who have experienced systemic erasures of material evidences of their identities, histories, as well as the atrocities inflicted upon them, the body is one of their only sustained forms of documentation and placement. These practices of erasure are articulated by architect and urbanist Mirjana Ristic (2018) who, in her book Architecture, Urban Space and War, offers a practice-based vocabulary for these erasures in the form of three -cides: ‘spatiocide’, which refers to the targeting of entire landscapes with the aim of reverting it back to mere land (or what colonial forces termed terra nullius) by wiping out origin communities, ‘urbicide’, which refers to the destruction of urban neighbourhoods through practices such as gentrification and forced removals, and ‘memoricide’, which refers to the killing of memory through the destruction of cultural heritage, such as religious buildings and urban quarters, to erase the material traces of marginalized communities (Ristic, 2018). These targeted groups had often been literally left with only their bodies, because that is what functioned as the commodity of value for their colonizing forces.

With that context in mind, we ask the following

questions at this scale: 1. How do we practice in ways that are not disembodying, dismembering and/or distant, which has been what the South African architecture discipline has so far offered; curricula where one is neither able to see nor inquire about their own experiences of the world, and one is not permitted to offer up their worlds as valid orientations? What is the body, in spite of this, refusing to forget?

2. How do we retire negating languages, to give way to inherent ones, which is about what wants to be communicated rather than what hegemonically insists on being communicated?

This is about what is pacified when one is trained to be a professional. We ask: what is the language of what wants to come alive through us?

With these in focus, we prioritize excavating, indexing, priming, storytelling (under which practices such as cartography, broadcasting, and scripting sit), and performance (where practices such as modelling sit). We work toward the Unit’s outputs being the evidence of ways of seeing that have not always had the permission to live in the light.

Visions and Futures / 1:100,000

The next scale that we focus on is the ideological one, where we thematically structured the syllabus through the building blocks – or state service infrastructures – of modern states that include religion, defence, the law, administration, media and economics. In line with Australian architect and urbanist Kim Dovey’s (2002) provocation in his book Framing Places, where he articulates how systems of authority use architecture as legitimizing symbols of belief systems, we deprioritize the emphasis placed on the material forms that architecture takes, and focus rather on the inherent concepts that they operate as symbols for (Dovey, 2002). What this means is that we don’t so much care for church buildings more than the socio-spatial consequences of religion’s formulation of moral codes of conduct, we don’t so much care for wars and military bases more than the socio-spatial consequences of defence’s production of damaging binaries and systems of control, surveillance, punishment and territories, and so on.

These service infrastructures take the form of societal myths, and in that way, French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1972) explains that what has form is vulnerable to being stripped of its meaning, to be objectified, and made to signify those myths (Barthes and Lavers, 1972).

What that then births are practices that are in service to this signified meaning.

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Scope and Scale / 1:5,000

We then move on to the scale at which we scope out networks and systems of engagement. We temporarily suspend any and all forms of pre-determined architectural scopes, so that we can allow an inquiry’s scope to reveal itself through the design research process.

The introductory podcast inquires about this in several instances, like when proposing to reposition municipal boundaries as a way to configure new zones.

This act of space-changing informs state resource capacity and allocations, although not included in our scope of practice. In the podcast, it is also proposed that some existing private amenities become publicly accessible on a rotational schedule. Although this design decision does not produce more built form, its impact on spatial meaning, use and its surrounding context is significant. Just these two practices alone were crucial design decisions that were made by the apartheid government. Zoning allowed the state to hoard resources and disproportionately distribute it to racialized communities, while civic amenities were public only for certain racial groups. For architects of the democratic era to then design without being able to make decisions at that scale of space-making presents a real threat toward any significant socio-spatial and cultural transformation.

Many of the other provocations that were proposed in the podcast find their roots in existing spatial practices around the world. The idea of drug parks come from Switzerland’s Platzspitz Park, where drug abuse was reduced by 92% when they turned some of their public parks into free drug access parks. There, they provided the cleanest and safest drug strands, legally and for free.

At its inception, there was uproar at the mere thought of this type of proposition, and it required buy-in from their legislature, but once it was implemented, the results

spoke for themselves.

This powerful relationship between politics and spacemaking was famously demonstrated by Jaime Lerner in the Brazilian city of Curitiba, who, as an architect and urban planner, took up the position of mayor. He prioritized pedestrians by paving large areas of the city’s roads and established their Bus Rapid Transit system over a weekend when he shut down the whole city to speed up construction. He eradicated isolated parks and made them an interconnected network of parks, turning unusable land into connector parks. This made the city a leisure paradise that now has four times the recommended amount of green space per inhabitant.

To maintain the city’s expansive vegetation, he introduced sheep to graze on the grass, to replace their environmentally unfriendly industrial lawn maintenance techniques. Many of Lerner’s decisions would not be possible if he operated only as an architect. He required some political capacity to introduce, firstly, ideological changes in thinking, to then materialize their infrastructural evidence.

In the process of design in Unit 19, we allow ourselves to step into any necessary roles, for the purpose of better understanding what is required to enable a way of thinking to come to life in material form.

Next year, our focus will root itself in reconstituting ground philosophies, and then making sense of all that is required to bring those philosophies to life.

At this scale, we ask the following questions: 1. What is the extent of our propositional capacity, and how do we free ourselves from the segregated disciplinary scope that it is currently practiced under?

2. What other disciplines can/must we tap into, to effectively and necessarily expand the scope of architecture’s propositional capacity?

3. How do we relieve the pressure on architecture to engage in isolation what historically operated in cross-disciplinary modes?

Site / 1:100

At this scale, that of site, is where we ground ourselves and where we design within all of that thinking that precedes it at different scales. At this scale, we ask: 1. What is our way into site?

2. What is its ground philosophy, the resultant material artifacts of those ground philosophies, and what do we make of it?

3. What do we propose of that ground?

4. How do we catalyse that proposed ground and its resultant material artifacts?

EDITOR’S NOTE / 2021

Within that frame, we ask the following at this scale: 1. What are the ideological foundations on which we are building, and which we give form to, and how can they be reimagined and reconfigured if and where necessary?

2. How do we trigger new worlds if we find existing ones harmful, inadequate or incomplete, to move the discipline away from acting only as a maintenance industry to a pseudo-static world? Can architects once again be soothsayers, fortune tellers, conjurers, forecasters?

3. How do we liberate our dreams, senses and imagination from its distracted state, so that it can move beyond the limited prescribed ideological scope it keeps being offered?

As a Unit, we continue to grow and learn, and these articulated questions and clarities are helping inform our trajectory surrounding the ‘ground’ and ways of grounding as our primal way of entering into the practice of architecture.

Through the questions outlined above, we will in 2022 investigate one of the most violent yet ongoing ground philosophies ever offered up to the African continent, the terra nullius. This philosophy and our intended approach to it is expanded upon at the end of this publication.

With such ongoing histories, the Unit grounds itself soberly within the urgent nature of such necessary research pursuits, feeling evermore ready, willing and able to take it on.

References 1.) Barthes, R. and Lavers, A., 1972. Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press, pp.109-164.

2.) Britannica, 2018. The Editors of Encyclopaedia.

Catharsis. [encyclopedia] Encyclopedia Britannica.

Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/catharsiscriticism Accessed 21 November 2021.

3.) CliffCentral.com, 2017. Matopia. [podcast] The Ma(i) de Sessions.

Available at: https://cliffcentral.com/maide-sessions/ matopia/ Accessed 2 October 2021.

4.) Dovey, K., 2002. Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form. New York: Routledge, p.14.

5.) Hooks, B., 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, p.191.

6.) Kattan, K., 2021. The Funambulist Correspondents 19 /// Imagining Palestinian Futures Beyond Colonial Monumentality. [O] THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/thefunambulist-correspondents-19-imagining-palestinianfutures-beyond-colonial-monumentality Accessed 3 October 2021.

7.) Mauss, M., 1973. Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society, 2(1), pp.70-88.

8.) Mowbray, S., 2017. A Brief History of Zurich’s Needle Park. [O] theculturetrip.com.

Available at: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/ switzerland/articles/a-brief-history-of-zurichs-needlepark/ Accessed 1 October 2021.

9.) Ristic, M., 2018. Architecture, Urban Space and War: The Destruction and Reconstruction of Sarajevo. [Place of publication not identified]: Switzerland, pp.29, 34-38.

10.) unknown. City of Dreams. 2006. [video] Australia: Journeyman Pictures.

xv oNform v FOREWORD

There is no hand or gaze to stop you, by Anesu Chigariro

vii Unit 19 is for the ones...

a poem by Olive Olusegun

xi EDITOR’S NOTE

Toward Unsettling Ground, by Tuliza Sindi

xviii INTRODUCTION

The Act of Service 2021 T-02: The Myth of Violence

xx BROADCASTING

Cape Town, South Africa In Search of Grounded Entries

SUBMERGED GROUNDS 031 M2 Forts of Sand:

A Reimagining of Black Childhood Through Critical Fabulation.

Miliswa Ndziba

045 M1 The Ongoing Public Auction:

A Re-embodiment of the Black Female Body Through Installation.

Patricia Bandora

057 M1 Theme Park of Mirage Heavens.

Veronicah Maluleke

067 M2 The Black Label:

Rebranding the Ngqayi.

Shiloh Rakumakwe

^EDITOR’S NOTE_CONTENTS / 2021

CONTENTS

SYSTEMIC GROUNDS 081 M2 Cartographies of Masculinity:

Pathway to Redemption.

Brighton Matambo

093 M1 Gender Geography:

From Rural Tales to Kitchen Realities, Toward a Reconfiguration of Gendered Cultural Classifications.

Liso Mdiya

105 M1 Territories of Disobedience.

Thembeka Mpolweni

117 M2 [De]constructing Utopia.

Ntombizethu Shube

SACRED GROUNDS 133 M2 Rituals of Muted Labours:

The Sexual Objectification of Women’s Bodies in Strip Clubs.

Dimpho Selepe

145 M2 Kukwami La:

Department of Land Reform.

Thandeka Mnguni

159 M2 Custodianship of Paradise:

Counter-Mapping Ancestral Land and Legacies.

Tuki Mathibedi

175 M2 Watropolis:

Subverted Narratives of Ritual Disorder.

Tshwanelo Kubayi

SUSPENDED GROUNDS 191 M2 Missing Ingredients at the Last Supper:

Gathering at the Table of Past Selectivity with the Dispossessed of the Cape Flats.

Natalie Harper

203 M1 Eclipse of the Patriarchy.

Razeenah Manack

213 M1 Regulations of Professionalism:

The Seductive Logic of Developments.

Olive Olusegun

xvii oNform CONTENTS / 2021

223 THE ACT OF SERVICE 2022

T-03: Beyond the Terra Nullius

227 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IMAGE NAMING KEY

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INTRODUCTION

THE ACT OF SERVICE 2021 T-02: The Myth of Violence Unit Leader: Tuliza Sindi Unit Tutor: Muhammad Dawjee Unit Assistant: Lynette Breed (formerly Boshoff)

“…For you, the ocean is for surf boards, boats and tans And all the cool stuff you do under there in your bathing suits and goggles But we, we have come to be baptised here We have come to stir the other world here We have come to cleanse ourselves here We have come to connect our living to the dead here Our respect for water is what you have termed fear The audacity to trade and murder us over water Then mock us for being scared of it…”

- Koleka Putuma, Excerpt from Water.

Unit 19 approaches state service infrastructures – such as religion, the military, and the law – as frameworks of societal myths, and through it, investigates what mythological role(s) their architectural translations fill. The word ‘myth’ comes from the Greek mythos, meaning (in part) “rumour”, that US philosopher Matthew Dentith (2014:146) describes as a social grooming activity that works together with existing social beliefs to produce alternative versions powerful enough to override those existing beliefs (Dentith 2014:146).

The Unit approaches architecture as a rhetoric device that induces compliance to the often-unintelligible societal systems of beliefs that constitute social production. Through storytelling, image-making and performance, the Unit investigates architecture’s semiotic and semantic constructions, toward proposing and (re)constructing myths that incite new spatial fantasies and futures.

In 2021, students will investigate the intersection between architecture and violence through the lens of military service. Militaries are inextricably linked with the

formation of states and predate the creation of modern states. They fulfil opposing functions in different regions of the world. While Europe’s military forces are outward-facing and function to expand their territorial access, Africa’s inward-facing military forces were coopted into colonial armed forces to preserve African states in their image, and to control their own people.

For this year’s Major Design Project (MDP), students will propose a ‘Defence Base’ as a heterotopia. In definition, a defence base is a shelter for military equipment and personnel that facilitates training, innovation, and operations. In modern practice however, it often masquerades as supply centres for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. French philosopher Michel Foucault (1967:3) describes ‘heterotopias’ as outside of all places, even if located within a real site, and calls them “counter-sites” (Foucault 1967:3) whose corresponding real sites are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1967:3). As site exploration for 2021, students will go in search of shores of past, present and/or future military significance in Cape Town – South Africa’s

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References

1.) Dentith, M., 2014. The philosophy of conspiracy theories.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

2.) Foucault, M, 1967. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.

Translated from French by J Miskowiec. Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité: l’Architettura.

3.) InZync Poetries (2016). Koleka Putuma – Water (Performance).

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8dfq3C8GNrE&t=179s&ab_ channel=InZyncPoetries Accessed: 02 January 2019.

INTRODUCTION / 2021

colonial gateway. They will investigate the county’s spatial language of violence – and its socio-political and economic dependencies on it – that includes its inland spatial systems of control expressed as apartheid townships. Designed as labour camps, townships’ spatial articulations include militarized control elements, and infrastructural buffers as its bounds. The country’s majority of citizens remain in those townships today, which sustains their historically restricted use of state resources in favour of hoarding and extraction by the ruling classes and the colonies; making their continued presence perversely bound to our shores. Housing spectres, superstitions, and myths, the Cape shores function as graveyards, yacht routes, nature reserves, and important routes for free shipping. They are portals steeped in economic pillage and betrayal, for classist respite and ancestral mourning. As mythologists, dreamers and performers, students will investigate the myths upon which their shore sites are spatially articulated, to reimagine those foundations and their corresponding spatial futures.

BROADCASTING

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA In Search of Grounded Entries We conceived of the Cape Shores as vulnerable thresholds, and in our context, these thresholds were the first entryway for both British and Dutch colonial forces.

Even today, some of the Cape coast routes are revered for their phenomenal trade and access capacity, but not necessarily for the benefit of the South African state.

Students were able to conceive of shores not only by their physical characteristics, but by their socioeconomic orientations through the definition of ‘port cities’. This allowed students to expand the meaning of shore to socio-political gateway/threshold.

Going to site this year took place between 27 April - 02 May. We went with historian and political science major Sabelo Mcinziba as our guide, where we were taken to crucial sites of violence, including the Cape Fort, the Slave Lodge, and Noon Gun. The following reflection of the site visit was conceptualized as three simultaneous broadcasts that embody the differing orchestrated experiences that this racialized territory designed as purposefully divergent along racial lines. Understanding how we were positioned at varying degrees of proximities to the city’s violences presented us a rich terrain of creative unfleshing in our attempt to document the field trip.

Through this observation, we used our policized profiles as a mode of documentation, a lens, and a frame. I, as a black woman of Congolese and Burundian heritage, Muhammad and as Indian man with Cape Malay lineage, and Lynette as a white Afrikaans woman first articulated our broadcasted experiences of site in isolation. What quickly emerged were the varying scales of observation and detail articulation, from the ideological to the

intimate scales. We then went about the process of unravelling the relationships between the broadcasts, whether complimentary, negating, muffled, forceful, static, terrorizing, and so on.

This negotiated outcome is articulated through varying font types, sizes and finishes, word alignments, spacings, footnotes, and tones as the jointing details of the initially separate broadcasts.

What it arrives at becomes an elegy to the breathtaking Cape Town that we wish it was and that it is portrayed as, but falls short of as its truths continue to escape its pores, insisting that we reckon with it.

Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), University of Johannesburg.

Muhammad Dawjee

Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), University of Johannesburg.

Tuliza Sindi

Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), University of Johannesburg.

“Die Kaap is weer Hollands”, which translates to “The Cape is Dutch again”, is an old Afrikaans idiom which means ‘all is right with the world again’.

This, for me, is one of the seminal summations of South African politics and social hierarchy in South Africa: things are only considered to be going well when they are going well for the Dutch. The idiom does not indicate that things are going well for South Africans in general, but rather for a particular (minuscule) portion of South Africans. Because for the Cape to be ‘Dutch again’ would certainly not hold ‘good tidings’ for any non-Dutch South Africans – as was proven time and again during our country’s tumultuous history.

1

In 1795, during the Anglo-French War, Britain seized the Dutch colony at the Cape. When in 1802, the war ended, the Cape was returned to the Dutch - a victory which was celebrated with the exclamation, “die Kaap is weer Hollands!!”. Although the British re-invaded and colonised the Cape only three years later, the expression survived.

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Lynette Boshoff

PROJECTION / 2021

On the third day – and in a sea of violence – “Die Kaap is weer Hollands”.1 : moment[s] of silence.

And on the third day, God created land- [or, the most weaponized natural resource in the history of human-kind].

On this third day, God also created the seas- [or the conquerors’ vehicle to more of that ‘resource’].

We descend the city toward the grand parade and the air begins to thicken with guilt. Not all my own, but I hear it whispering amongst the granite stones that listen to our feet on the pavements of this hollowed out land.

Land that used to be under the sea, exposed now, almost as if the Dutch engineers who did this work sought to drive the sea back home – to split it like moses, so that their thieving relation to this land became forever connected by the natural ground level beneath the waters.

(I don’t think it a coincidence that the creations that have most been used to enforce Man’s state of godliness upon the earth were created on the third day, or that the act that demonstrated Man’s conquering of the single human condition that differentiates us from gods occurred- on the third day.)

On the third day, Jesus, as a proxy for all humanity, rose from the dead, demonstrating his – so ultimately our – victory over death.

Where we have lacked in divine ability, the conviction of a divine ordainment has fuelled centuries of learning to escape death and inflict it onto those who compete with us for foreign land. Interestingly, the idiom finds its origin in a European war fought on African soil: the 1795 Anglo-French War in which Britain seized the Dutch colony at the Cape. Which implies that native South Africans were never in the running for the idiom to refer to them: the Cape could have become French, British or Dutch again, but never again Khoi. Or Xhosa.

moat at the fort (Castle of Good Hope) with democratic south african flag hoisted at full mast above

Stop. Wait for me. Something has caught my attention.

a ‘slightly taller’ statue of Mandela at site of his first public speech after his release from prison in 1990

He’s perched above eye level, on the plinth of an edwardian colonnade smiling. He’s always smiling at us - despite our condition. And we’ve given him away to be stolen, to be captured, to be caricatured and owned.

He is an impostor, imposing upon us the figure of our own failure. He looks out over us, but not at us. He mirrors our own loss and uncertainty. (…in such face-offs, my mind wrestles with dissociation; erasure.)

At the Castle of Good Hope, the tour guide was continuously pulling me, the only white visitor in our group, into his presentation (by for example referencing my Afrikaner surname’s history) - demonstrating an inflated recognition of whiteness as the real audience to the Castle’s history. This impression is confirmed by the fact that we could see white families bringing their children on a pilgrimage [of this land’s ongoing sin even Koleka’s3 baptising sea can’t seem to save] to the Castle – something I also experienced as a child. This is what Afrikaans families do when we come to big cities: we visit museums.

In Bloemfontein, it is the Vroue and Taal Monuments.

In Pretoria, it is the Voortrekker Monument.

In Cape Town, it is the Castle, the Company Gardens, the Noon Gun at Signal Hill…

(The number ‘three’ has strong religious meaning, and is said to embody the very presence and completeness of God.)

2 In spite of the overwhelming sense of the moment, I did not capture it. I did not freeze or frame it, perhaps to reduce the number of mediums through which I can be lied to (Sindi 2021).

3 Koleka Putuma is a South African poet and theatre-maker. One of her poems, Water, was written as a response to a white South African woman that expressed racialized disgust on Facebook at the number of black people that she witnessed on a Durban beach in the east coast of South Africa. In the poem, she speaks of what water means for black South Africans, and how it is both dreaded and loved like a god (Nkosi 2016).

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This Eurocentric gaze became a visceral reality during our recent trip to Cape Town. Whether at Clifton 4th beach, the Castle of Good Hope or even the District Six museum, my impression was always that the city’s gaze2 was set upon its European and Afrikaner visitors.

“Die Kaap is weer Hollands”.

(While I usually let my mind savour in the memory of the experiences that I purposefully choose not to capture, so that they can be revisited as if I were re-immersing myself once more in it; At what point does this cease to be productive? Why should we willingly revisit this particular pain when we live it each day? The locks and chains that bound us captive and rendered us property are unchanged.) The walls are restored timeously to hide the cracks, to render the earth still, to keep us out of history. Nothing shivers here, nothing reveals its time.

Did Jan van Riebeeck spec. these floor level LED lights?

Cape Town, which has in recent years taken on the persona of a cosmopolitan, buzzing, ‘eclectic’ city on the global stage, professes itself to attract “outcasts and eccentrics” (Alexander 2020), but neglects to mention the cost of buying a place in the social structure.

Think of its iconic pink Holyrood building4, featured in glossy design magazines for its inclusive nature, only to omit the cost of renting one of its tiny apartments, which overlooks the Company Gardens.

Later, I hail a taxi on Adderley street toward Seapoint to see my nephew.

This city is the only place I can ride the taxi with confidence because we speak the same tongue – stolen too and used to justify the indigeneity of a people who modified and finalised the generational iterations of oppression their ancestors instituted by design. Like me, my nephew will not know his language. He too will be forced to navigate mythical territories of separateness in other tongues. What world will we leave him when we’re gone? How will he remember? What will he forget?

On our last day, the class visited Clifton 4th Beach.

4

Cape Town boasts its iconic pink Holyrood apartment building: a late 1930’s Art Deco building, originally designed by Cedric Melbourne Sherlock as holiday accommodation for working-class families visiting Cape Town (Alexander 2020).

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(In spite of the overwhelming sense of the moment, I did not capture it. I did not freeze or frame it, perhaps to reduce the number of mediums through which I can be lied to.)

On the third day, I felt the presence of God as we proceeded along a meandering Chapman’s Peak drive; arguably one of the most beautiful drives one can witness anywhere in the world. Seeing the sea that way, in all its endless majesty, feels like meeting God in person.

chapman’s peak drive lookout point over the atlantic ocean

And then it hits me:

PROJECTION / 2021

several moments in cape town, emotionally unavailable

across this expansive stretch of geography that my vision can only just fully contain, I can only see the enclaves of the descendants of those that brought me god as a weapon in exchange for all that was created on the third day. And just like that, as if it were this nation’s culminating constant – in a meeting with God, is always a meeting with the devil.

Though Koleka says that we have come to be baptised here, these waters – cold and foreign stir up the histories of our drowning and in them we face the vast craters of our ancestral loss. In our attempts to side-step the reality of this pain, our best attempt is to make a spectacle of its beauty. Yet, nothing can fill this void. nothing should nothing ever will

The Cape has never not been Dutch.

original door hardware upon exit of the fort – still in commission

die Kaap is weer Hollands! 2019. [O]. Available: https://culmaer.tumblr.com/post/182160929150/die-kaap-is-weer-hollands-afrikaans-idiom Accessed 20 May 2021.

Nkosi, L. 2016. Water and fire – inspiring a new generation of poets. City Press. [O].

Available: https://www.news24.com/citypress/trending/water-and-fire-20160704 Accessed 13 June 2019.

Sindi, T. 2021. On the third day. Field Trip article. Unpublished. Graduate School of Architecture, Johannesburg.

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Alexander, R. 2020. Art Deco Cape Town Apartment. [O]. Available: https://visi.co.za/art-deco-cape-town-apartment/ Accessed 20 May 2021.

PROJECTION / 2021

References:

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adj.

1. beneath the surface of the water.

2. completely covered or obscured.

000 M2 Forts of Sand: A Reimagining of Black Childhood Through Critical Fabulation.

MILISWA ndziba 000 M1 The Ongoing Public Auction: A Re-embodiment of the Black Female Body Through Installation. patricia bandora 000 M1 Theme Park of Mirage Heavens. veronicah maluleke

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Miliswa Ndziba

FORTS OF SAND:

A Reimagining of Black Childhood Through Critical Fabulation.

SITE: Ocean floor along the south-east cost of Africa between Cape Town & Mossuril, Mozambique

Abstract Forts of Sand explores the myth of black children in South Africa growing up faster than children of other politically-determined races.

The work approaches architecture as the practice of manifesting the fantasy of persons or people through space-making. In South Africa the apartheid regime employed spatial segregation to produce a utopic vision of reality in which black South Africans were rendered invisible. It was an architecture of fantasy. Thus, black children were denied their childhood in order to fast-track their entry into adulthood so as to justify their sole function as labour on the periphery of this fantasy. In current day South Africa, black childhood remains continually erased through space-making.

The study makes use of sand play and “critical fabulation” (Hartman, 2008) as narrative devices to make sense of the spatial condition created by the Sao Jose Paquete Africa shipwreck on the ocean floor off the coast of Clifton 4th Beach in Cape Town, and proposes a passage along the coast of the African continent from the site of the shipwreck to the Mossuril Island of Mozambique that bridges the journey home for the drowned child slaves to their final resting place.

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R: 4th passage, elevation, linedrawing, 1:50,000,000.

The work’s lens of focus since last year has been on the impact of architecture on the scripting of black childhood. The work inquires about this through world-building and child play, and through such performance methods, works to render visible what has been erased, hidden or forgotten.

The year’s work was inspired by two key references: the first is a book by Ben Okri that the author says haunts her, called Astonishing the Gods, which is a fable about an invisible man who is on a quest to find out the secret of visibility.

The second is the fictional undersea world of Drexciya, which is an underwater fantasy world that was conceptualized by an electronic duo of the same name.

Its inhabitants are the unborn children of the pregnant women that were thrown overboard slave ships during the Middle Passage. US digital artist Nettrice Gaskins states how “Drexciya exists as a sonic third space characterized by embedded myths, the construction of culture and the invention of tradition” (Gaskins, 2016).

From the onset, the research was conducted through sand play that later became a series of material studies.

One of the early projects, titled Where’s Waldo, is made up of a peep shows that – for the first time in the work across the two years – introduces a condition that locates audiences both in a material and fictional world simultaneously. While the work’s prompts locate audiences in the image-based fiction, their actions, upon following instruction, are marked and cemented through their engagement with the sand layers. Through this, what gets interrogated are degrees of scripting toward affecting material reality through fictional narrative.

In Moving Stories, a ‘sea-in-a-box’ model – or a kind of mobile sea – is introduced that allows the exploration of sand as a memory device, and enables a study on the relationship between sand and water.

As an extension of those works, scripting is again tested in Damsel in Distress, but this time, through a framework of performance intents rather than as a prescribed

performance outline. This framework, where one is afforded the capacity to negotiate the written narrative, presents a foreshadowing of the use of Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation process, which will be explained shortly.

The project then focusses itself through the haunting and threatening remnants of Clifton 4th Beach (in Cape Town) to black childhood, and introduces one of its less told secrets: the event in which Portuguese slave ship, the São José-Paquete de África was sailing from Mozambique to Brazil and struck rocks near the shore, causing it to sink in its turbulent waters on 27 December 1794. Its remains were found off its coast in 2015 and its remnants are said to be as far-reaching as Cape Point. Of the 512 slaves that were onboard the ship, 212 drowned, and the remaining slaves were sold the following day in Cape Town. In honour of this, the work first approaches the site as an unsettled underwater cemetery on the ocean floor whose inhabitants – particularly the restless drowned child slaves of the shipwreck – build and rebuild forts of sand as a defense base that affords them undisturbed dignity in their final resting place.

As the work brings the stories of those lost souls to life, real life phenomena are rescripted to render those details, such as the churning of water that’s caused by the tides – and which divers of the area describe as being like a ‘giant washing machine’ – as the characteristic component of this fortified cemetery. It is at this stage that the work takes advantage of sand as a drawing tool, as it is allowed to perform as an honest material.

Parallel to this process, the shipwreck’s archive was visited and mined through Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation, which refers to a style of semi-nonfiction that attempts to bring the suppressed voices of the past to the surface by means of hard research and scattered facts. Hartman theorizes the act of storytelling as a form of compensation or even reparations, and as a practice of refashioning disfigured lives, especially when practicing it at the limit

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B-L: Mycelium Growth on the Surface of the Water, elevation, photo/line-drawing, 1:1.

R: Phased Projection of Algal Bloom Growth in The Endless Waters, cross-section/collage, line-drawing, 1:20.

of the unspeakable and the unknown, the erased, the hidden, the buried.

Through the creation myth of the cemetery, where the story of both the wreck and the lost souls are revived, its filmic narration functions as both map and script that going forward immerses us into the world that is being brought to life.

Hello from Clifton 4th Beach introduces the conditions of both above and below the sea level as simultaneous broadcasts, where audiences are located both on the beach and on the ocean floor simultaneously. Audiences are made to occupy the point of view of the drowned child slaves as they start to hold narrative capacity as revived actors in the work. Their presence starts to encroach on the above-sea-level condition.

While undergoing the narrative and archive process, mycelium was introduced early on in the ‘sea-in-abox’, as a way to model the marine fungi that was introduced as the organism that feeds on the remains of the drowned child slaves. This was conceptualized as their rebirth as they are turned into algal bloom. This dangerous bloom was first narrativized as a biological weapon to drive out the haunting presence of white childhood so as to preserve the final resting place of the drowned child slaves.

The work progresses to in fact conceptualize the bloom B-L

as the Fourth Passage; a bridge that marks the route and transports the troubled drowned souls back home to Mossuril, Mozambique over 5 days, so that they may truly rest.

For added context, the First (slave trade) Passage refers to the first leg of the journey, when in this case, the Sao Jose ship carried cargo like firearms and gunpowder to Mozambique. Upon arrival, the cargo was exchanged for slaves. Loaded with its human cargo, the ship set sail to Brazil on what was seen as the Second or Middle Passage. After the shipwreck, the surviving slaves did not complete their Second or Third Passage journies – the Third Passage referring to the trade of cargo between Portugal and Brazil – because they were sold in the Cape.

In the Homebound film, the author’s hand, as a progenitor of the lost souls, moves at the exact speeds, frequency and direction of the winds along the coastal route home and tracks the time it would take for the algal bloom – that acts as a vehicle for the drowned child slaves – to reach the Mossuril shore of Mozambique.

The proposition map is drawn from the bottom of the sea as the work continually prioritizes this orientation and gaze. The child slaves make their way back home, and their presence is felt there through their colonization of the abandoned Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte colonial structure.

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L-2: Fish View of the Port of Cape Town Algal Bloom Invasion, elevation, line-drawing, 1:50,000.

R-2: Fish View of the Port of Cape Town Algal Bloom Invasion, plan, line-drawing, 1:5,000.

L-3: Port of Cape Town Algal Bloom Invasion, cross-section/ collage, line-drawing, 1:5,000 vs 1:10.

R-3: Fish View of the Algal Bloom Approaching The Fort of São Sebastião on the Island of Mozambique, elevation, linedrawing, 1:10,000.

References 1.) Gaskins, N., 2016. Deep Sea Dwellers: Drexciya and the Sonic Third Space. Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, 10(2), p.75.

2.) Hartman, S., 2008. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), pp.1-14.

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R-1: Still taken from Homebound: The 4th Passage, elevation/ section, line-drawing/video, 1:10,000,000.

2021

L-1: Fish View of the Journey of the Drowned Child Slaves (Reborn as Algal Bloom) along the 4th Passage, elevation, linedrawing, 1:10,000,000.

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L: Algal Bloom View of the Fortification of the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, cross-section/collage, line-drawing, 1:50 vs 5:1.

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Patricia Bandora

THE ONGOING PUBLIC AUCTION:

A Re-embodiment of the Black Female Body Through Installation.

SITE: Old Slave Tree Memorial on Spin Street, Cape Town

Abstract Architecture is a practice that reflects the historically and socially constructed spatial practices that have informed the way that the Black female body is perceived in South Africa. These spatial practices are rooted in slave auctioning that took place under a Fir tree during Cape Slavery (1658-1834), where its original location now a houses memorial site. During the process of slave trade, slave women’s bodies (and particularly their sexual reproductive organs) were displayed, dehumanized, and made economic property.

Even in the absence of the Fir tree, the soul of the profound act of public auctioning lives on, as its figurative roots remain embedded within the substrata of South Africa. The Black female body remains scrutinized and continually rendered ‘hyper-visible’1, complicating black women’s agency to their own bodies in various public and private spatialities.

The work posits that architecture, as a physical marker of meaning and practice, and with it overriding and rescripting capacity, must therefore render these spatial manifestations ‘transparent’2 as a form of testimonial by interrupting these spatial practices.

The Ongoing Public Auction proposes an installation, at the Old Slave Auction Tree memorial, to correct the politically orchestrated condition of the objectified and commodified Black female body as hyper-visible while invisible, that both literally and figuratively lives on in the country’s collective consciousness.

It makes use of reflective surfaces, light, and shadow as sensory devices, to confront these realities and to redefine the meaning of black women in space, offering a re(member)ing of the Black female body.

1 A scrutiny based 2 A process rather

on perceived difference which is usually (mis)interpreted as deviance. than a material; it unfolds because of the changing position of the observer relating to the thing being observed.

Patricia Bandora_M1_SUBMERGED GROUNDS /

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M1

R: The Tale of the Fir Tree, sectional perspective, narrated film, 1:5,000 (clickable).

The work’s interests are rooted in gender politics and digs into the substrata of social patterning. Its groundwork comes from questions surrounding architecture’s capacity to reflect cultures and communities, and the consequences that arise to those with an absence of infrastructural representation, as was orchestrated of marginalized groups in colonial states.

These initial framing questions were extended into questions surrounding the representation of black women, inspired by a subjectify-ing of the author’s own body in space as a site of inquiry through the heterotopic space of the mirror in the private setting of the bedroom, and this investigation led toward a study of the relationship between gendered body politics and socio-spatial practice, to uncover the ongoing crisis of the hypersexualized and hyper-visible black female body.

The Unit’s site visit to Cape Town introduced the country’s slave history and the practice of slave auctioning that occured underneath a Fir Tree on Spin Street. With the tree no longer there, the site now houses the Old Slave Auction Tree memorial. The auctioning of people of colour as mere bodies became a significant lens of study to better understand the historical categorization and placement of types of bodies and body parts in relation to their modern socio-political and corresponding spatial placements. Where men’s height, strength, stamina and physical stature were prioritized, women’s sexual reproductive organs were the primary commodities on sale, and eugenics and anthropological taxonomy methods are used to articulate the economic and gynaecological definitions of slave women’s bodies.

The work tries to make sense of the continued trade of black women as body appendages, and uncovers the practices’ eerily overlapping characteristics to South Africa’s historical slave auctions. For this purpose, the work is structured as a historical timeline that grapples with histories that have been determined as finished, while their reproductive outcomes are in fact ongoing.

The intimate device of the testimonial is used as a conceptual framework to revive the silence in the

archives of the slave women, and as a conceptual device, it reintroduces witnesses to the lives of the silenced and buried women. The Fir Tree by the Slave Auction Tree memorial is reconceptualized as the last living witness to the auctions that took place underneath and around it, and through the Pepper’s Ghost technique of modelling, the architectural components of the site are personified, including the tree, soil, pavement and concrete plinth, to unravel their hauntings.

A cross-section of the site is modelled and used to unravel its buried layers as architecture and its elements are engaged not as a stage, but as actors, that are able to mask, pretend, and take on a new personality. Light, shadow, depth and movement articulate the language of the model, such as its notions of above and below ground, hidden and explicit, and ongoing and static. The model gets narrated through three evolving archetypes of black female identity that belong to the racialized and gendered public realm.

Before arriving at this, the year’s earlier works delved into the forms of spatial (mis)representations confronting black women at both the intimate and urban scales. A lifestyle magazine that satirizes the lives of the most spatially dispossessed was created to parallel the details of that form of living to the conversations surrounding green living, to expose the ongoing vulnerability of orchestrated politicized lives to narrative rescripting and repackaging.

Through the apartheid urban strategy map, black female experiences of agency and safety within informal settlements was diagrammatically charted. The study homed in on Khayelitsha township in Cape Town and used the apartheid urban plan diagram as a device through which to map a woman’s relationship to the spatial conditions of Khayelitsha, and in the process revealed their states of hyper-visibility, invisibility, and non-belonging on the basis of their politicized identity.

The work proposes a cosmetic shop installation as a defence against the memorialization of rescripted histories, to investigate the modern trading of body

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R

00:06. I, the fir tree am the conqueror of lands.

00:15. I thrive on innocent soil, which I spoil.

00:30. I am used as a tool for the colonization process

00:40. My heavy and violently growing roots imprint, suppress and oppress

00:56. Slave women have their bodies observed.

1:00. I am nourished by their tears

1:08. If you cut me down, my roots may decompose but the seed of violence has been sowed.

1:15. The soul of my colonial roots has blinded people

10

B-L: The Growth of the Fir Tree and Condition of the Black Skin, sections, collages in scientific catalogue, 1:100,000.

R: Cape Slavery Supply Chain, systems catalogue, diagram, 1:100,000.

parts. The work offers that on the Spin Street memorial site as a living memoriam to Slave Auctioning. The cosmetic shop reveals how black women’s bodies are dismembered in ways that complicate their agency to their own bodies in space. The dehumanizing nature of the trade of lips, hair, buttocks and hips – which are all appendages associated to the hyper-sexualization of black female bodies – are brought to the fore as

an ongoing and confronting reality to reckon with. In this way, architecture is positioned as a form of live testimonial.

The project makes use of reflective surfaces, light, and shadow as sensory devices to redefine the meaning of black women in space, and offers a re(member)ing of those bodies.

Sprout

Seedling

Sappling

Sprout

Seedling

Sappling

I, the fir tree, am the conqueror of lands.

Transported on ships and arriving on beach sands.

I thrive on innocent soil, untouched by evil which I spoil. Those who brought me have the power to invade and rule – to be cruel.

I thrive on innocent soil, untouched by evil which I spoil. Those who brought me have the power to invade and rule – to be cruel.

Once I am planted that is when I am used as a tool.

For the colonization process.

Maturity

Decline

Afterlife

Maturity

Decline

Afterlife

Where my trunk is used as a pillar to demarcate space. For a public auction to sell slaves.

Slave women have their bodies observed to ensure that they are fit to breed. Scared to be taken, I watch as they plead.

Slave women have their bodies observed to ensure that they are fit to breed. Scared to be taken, I watch as they plead.

If you cut me down, my roots may decompose.

But the seed of violence has already been sowed.

B-L

I, the fir tree, am the conqueror of lands.

Transported on ships and arriving on beach sands.

Where my trunk is used as a pillar to demarcate space. For a public auction to sell slaves.

Once I am planted that is when I am used as a tool.

For the colonization process.

If you cut me down, my roots may decompose.

But the seed of violence has already been sowed.

OORLAM: previously enslaved and then transhipped

BAAREN: recently enslaved “salt-water slaves”.

Known as “Nuweling Slaaf”

CREOLE: born at the Cape. Known as “Van Der Kaap”

Slaves

Black skin

Reproductive organs

Breasts

Vagina

Muscles

Africa

Delgoa Bay

Zanzibar

Mozambique

Madagascar

39

Santiago

Terra de Natal

Sao Tome

Cape Verde

Guinea

Angola

Dahomey (Benin)

Voyages

Slave Ships

Raw Materials

Transportation

Suppliers

VOC (Dutch East India Company)

2021

Providing revenue to the state in the form of fees

Provide a minor disciplinary role for owners and later the

Providing a market for creole slaves

Customers Slave Market

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BURGHERS: who ran plantations and farms with slave labour

FREE BLACKS: who used the market to save their kin

COMPANY OFFICIALS: who managed all aspects of the oceanic slave trade

Actors

Ensuring liquidity of the investment of slaves

Function

DONATION SALES manumissions and gifts

MANDATORY sequestration

DISCRETIONARY cash, credit, bartering and swapping

MANDATORY deceased estate, cadastral and repatriation

Sales

Distributors Auction Tree

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1437 Men

527 Women

Total Slaves

Fort

Slave house

Slave Pen

Warehouses

R

T-L1: Goods for Sale: A Good House Servant, illustration, 1:100,000.

T-L2: Goods for Sale: An Excellent Cook, illustration, 1:100,000.

B-L: The Tale of the Public Auction, section, clay & light model, 1:5,000.

R: Black Female Body Part Supply Chain, systems catalogue, diagram, 1:100,000.

T-L1 T-L2

A Good House Servant

An Excellent Cook

Inspection tools

Inspection tools

measuring stick

speculum

Proposition

6 Spin Street Auction

Eternal Slave Tree

B-L

Above ground

The Angry Black Woman

Clay to symbolise ‘underground’

The Jezebel

The Maid

Invisible roots/condition of black woman

Make visible the condition of the black woman

Clothing/Retail

Plastic Surgery

Makeup

Distributors (most popular)

Industry

Lip filler

Lipliner

Product

Lipstick

Big Lips

Raw Materials

Metropolitain Cosmetics

The Cosmetics Company Store

Ralo Cosmetics

Signature Cosmetics and Fragrance

Skins Cosmetics

MAC Cosmetics

Bronzer

Foundation

Cosmetic (Makeup)

Lip pump

ubuy

Desertcart

Pricecheck

Gumtree

Takealot

Bidorbuy

SHEIN

Retail (Clothing)

Push-up bra

Breast pump Butt implants

Big Butt

Digital Store

Butt pads

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Plastic Surgeons

Distribution

s

Breast implants

Big Breasts

Packaging and quality inspections

Cosmetic (Surgery)

Tanning Spray

Melanotan II Tanning Lotion

Dark Skin

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Foschini

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Dischem

Clicks

Woolworths

051

Physical Store

Physical Store

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L: The Ongoing Public Auction: The Examination Room, section perspective, collage, 1:10.

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Veronicah Maluleke

THEME PARK OF MIRAGE HEAVENS. SITE: Tshwane Events Centre, Pretoria

Abstract Through the array of tools of the architect, architecture can be deployed as a tool that legitimises the illusory.

The work explores the spatial performance of written and unwritten contracts, or the (un)said agreements within institutions of consent (such as religious, educational, or domestic establishments), and how what is made visible (i.e., built) renders credible the contents of what is unseen. The work asks about the relationships that contracts have us build with each other through the institutionalising nature of space, and how these affect our societal and social programming.

Through the legitimization of the illusory within religious sects, associative institutional permissions legitimize acts of exploitation within them, such as sexual, financial, and labour exploitation.

The work proposes a theme park of the myriad of forms in which architecture is co-opted within religious practices as an evidencing tool that formulates belief and renders believers vulnerable to their exploitative characteristics. The theme park’s logic of use parallels the logic of charismatic church experiences, to reveal and give experiential language to the absurdity of their leaders’ exploitative practices through their pseudo-promises of heaven and reward.

Veronicah Maluleke_M1_SUBMERGED GROUNDS /

2021

M1

R: Room With Aborted Babies, perspective, collage, 1:1.

The work approaches architecture as a tool that can be co-opted by institutions into legitimizing their illusory sells, by providing its supposed material evidence that render those institutions credible and stable.

he would achieve this is by showing his congregants – while at the pulpit – fake plans and 3D renders of his proposed church development, to assure them that their tithes are being appropriately allocated.

The work’s particular institution of interest is charismatic religious faith systems that have god-like prophetic figures who often legitimize their financial, emotional, spiritual, sexual and labour abuses against their congregants. The work explores how those liberties are taken as a result of other forms of treatment that believers inherently consent to, as well as how spatial use is informed by the written and unwritten contracts within these charismatic institutions of consent.

A catalogue is constructed of the very costly items that Bushiri claims are necessary to reproduce conditions of a sacred alter in one’s personal space when away from the church premises. This collection of artefacts spatialises the reach of the charismatic church beyond its walls. Included in this collection is a special decoder that shows Bushiri as the anointed Man of God every time it is switched on and transports the viewer into an imagined space created by him.

The work’s overarching inquiry was sparked by an inquiry into the practice of marital rape, where consenting to be one’s sexual partner through that institution muddies the line between consent and force.

When seeing marriage through a religious lens, where it states that when one is married, their body belongs to their spouse, it reveals the added complexities surrounding what has been consented to when one has entered into that institution.

Documentation is compiled of the myriad versions of heaven that have been said to have been witnessed and sold to congregants as motivation for remaining followers. These include a room with all aborted babies that will confront women who have aborted their babies, and a prosthetics and body parts room for repairing injured and disabled persons.

To document the marriage bedroom toward evidencing this complex violence, photography, soundscaping, staging, and sequencing were introduced as narrative and forensic tools. This led onto other lesser expanded upon explorations of the medium, where it was used to obscure sexual harassment practices in charismatic churches. In spite of it being in its initial stages, the medium’s capacity to revive histories, to evidence the unseen, and to script, were key understandings for progressing the work’s conceptualizations around medium.

The author was a member of the now infamous prophet Bushiri church, the Enlightened Christian Gathering (ECG). At the time of this publication’s production, Bushiri has been charged with rape and fraud and is currently on the run. From personal experience, Bushiri’s antics regarding the use of architecture as a sell of his legitimacy are mapped. Some of the ways

It is through these collections of spatial sells that a theme park is proposed, to materialize these extensive spatial conditions as a collective pre-heaven experience, that unravels the folly of these sells. The artifacts and heavens uncovered in the research are approached as rides that parallel the absurd logic within those churches, where they start off as entertainment, but eventually require your labour and contribution in order to once more ‘enjoy’ the ride. By then, the veil that conceals the root of that enjoyment is dropped and that truth is offered as one to reckon with.

The Theme Park of Mirage Heavens is sited in the Tshwane Events Centre, a campus of exhibition halls that is a popular site for charismatic churches to rent out. When they do so, they drape the spaces in ways that mimic the bible’s description of draped sacred spaces in Exodus 26:31-33, to create temporary conditions of divinity while there.

Some of the rides include the following:

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L: Three Worlds Drop Tower, cross-section, REVIT drawing, 1:50.

T-R: Bumper Cars, Plan, REVIT drawing, 1:200.

The three worlds drop tower ride is an exaggeration of the logic of charismata gifts and the process toward earning miracles. The catch, however, is that after dropping below ground level the ride does not return, and congregants need to climb manually out of the pit. This tangibly introduces the labour expected of churchgoers, in return for the fleeting thrills promised by their spiritual leaders.

The bumper cars ride plays a similar trick in its intended L

B-R: Theme Park of Mirage Heavens, 3D, REVIT drawing, 1:500.

mis-operation. Riders cannot get off the cars as they do not stop, and they increase in speed. They don’t know yet that they are to make violent sacrifices by overturning other cars in order to get the ride to stop.

The castle of heavens ride contains the heavenly rooms, some of which were introduced earlier, and tries to formulate a coherent plan of the heavens that have tended to be described only as incoherent, volume-less, direction-less and material-less rooms.

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T-L: The Church Layout, plan, REVIT drawing, 1:200.

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B-L: Altar at Home, collection of artifacts, photography, 1:1.

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B-R2: The Institution of Marriage – The Bedroom, Image, Photography, 1:1.

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2021

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B-R1: Slave Whipping in a Chapel, 3D image, photography, 1:1.

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T-R: A ‘veiled’ Sight, 3D image, photography, 1:1.

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adj.

1. relating to an entire system, especially as opposed to a particular part.

2. entering a system from its roots.

000 M2 The Black Label: Rebranding the Ngqayi.

SHILOH RAKUMAKWE 000 M2 Cartographies of Masculinity: Pathway to Redemption.

BRIGHTON MATAMBO 000 M1 Gender Geography: From Rural Tales to Kitchen Realities, toward a Reconfiguration of Cultural Classifications.

LISO MDIYA 000 M1 Territories of Disobedience.

THEMBEKA MPOLWENI 000 M2 [De]constructing Utopia.

NTOMBIZETHU SHUBE

SYSTEMIC GROUNDS /

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Shiloh Rakumakwe

THE BLACK LABEL: Rebranding the Ngqayi.

SITE: South African Beer Advertisment of the 1990s Era

Abstract The research’s interest lies within representational techniques employed by alcohol advertisements that glamorize familiar spatial conditions and geographies to entice black male migrant labourers toward ideas of destructive escapism. It looks at the strategic positioning of alcohol through decades of advertising as a form of reward and consolation for workers’ miserable living conditions.

The manipulation of how a groups of people remember was done to assert that black people worldwide were naturally inferior intellectually and best suited only for manual labour (Takezawa, 2004). With this in mind, the work asks whether it’s possible to create a world where the preservation of black men’s sense of inferiority in previously black designated townships can be intercepted and their perceptions reoriented.

The proposition takes the form of an advertisement that addresses the urban spatial conditions of the apartheid township design scheme and how advertisements glamorize its characteristics in ways that are inverse to its violent nature (Haarhoff, 2010).

The work reveals the weaponized nature of advertising for the purpose of destroying social cohesion and growth within black communities. This occurs through geographic mimicry, which builds direct relationships between black male identity and spatial territoriality, in an attempt to perpetuate the representation of their inferiority as a social and cultural norm. Through this, reality takes the form of advertising, and advertising takes the form of reality.

Shiloh Rakumakwe_M2_SYSTEMIC GROUNDS /

2021

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R: Township Fantasy Pools Advert, plan, poster, 1:1,000.

The work’s interest is rooted in re-languaging, where last year, a popular undergraduate recommended book for architecture students was engaged with as site, and purposefully absented notions of time, context, distance, geometry, narrative and performance became the design proposition.

This year, the medium-of-representation interest moved toward the roles that adverts have played in the overindulgence of alcohol in black township communities, toward their social threat and instability.

Drinking for black migrant labourers (such as miners and contractors) was strategically positioned – through decades of advertising – as a form of reward, comfort and escape from their orchestrated misery of family separation, displacement and labour abuse.

Alcohol intemperance in South Africa can be traced back to the arrival of the Dutch, who glamorised alcohol and used it as currency, offering it in exchange for land from the indigenous peoples. This extended as a practice through what is called the ‘Dop System’, where employers paid their employees for their hard labour with poor quality wine. This practice has been legally prohibited, but the consequences remain one of the main challenges faced in the Western Cape, and traps workers within a cycle of poverty and dependence.

As the inverse of these, the Liquor Act of 1927 prohibited black South Africans from any forms of trade of and with alcohol, and criminalized all of their self-founded drinking establishments, replacing them them with state-mandated and -regulated beer halls.

These beer halls became the stage-sets to the corresponding beer advertisements that proliferated national television screens in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and

explicit ties between live geographies and the fictional advertisements’ projections onto reality were continually produced.

Of this, they articulated in the 1962 government document Your Bantu servant and You, under the ‘Liquor’ section that “Kaffir beer; their traditional national drink plays a very important part in the religious and social life of the Bantu and it is imperative that he should be placed in a position where he can legally obtain this most important beverage” (Your Bantu Servant …

1962:3).

Although in some black South African cultures, beer is considered the medicine of the home; is seen to re-affirm ties between neighbours, and calls upon the homestead’s ancestors for assistance, the apartheid system abused that intimate and sometimes sacred relation by refashioning it through the media as black migrant labourers’ exclusive practice of leisure and rest as a form of integration into their locations of work while away from their families.

The work’s provocation is one that extends the scope of representation of leisure for migrant workers, to include less destructive options that have historically been located in exclusively white territories far away from black-designated territories. It works to fold distant territories – that of luxury with that of servitude – onto one another through advertising, to produce quite unsettling and confronting smorgasbords of spatial elements that were purposefully not ever meant to touch. This is done as a way to highlight how ‘lack’ in spaces of servitude is a carefully curated function of those spaces, that find themselves unable to reconcile the alien elements of leisure that get introduced. The work produces a defence against the weaponization of image and media by challenging notions of exclusivity and prescription within them.

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R-2: The “Hidden” Typology, site plan, collaged line-drawing, 1:1,000.

S-1: The Construction Worker’s Journey, timeline, storyboard, 1:1.

S-2: The Construction Worker’s Journey, assembly drawing, storyboard flipbook, 1:1.

S-3: Township Fantasy Pools Advert, video construction, storyboard, 1:1.

References 1.) Haarhoff, E, (2010). Appropriating Modernism: Apartheid and the South African Township. Urban Transformation: Controversies, Contrasts and Challenges.

Accessed 01 August 2021.

2.) Hlalethwa, Z, (2018). Rise of the shebeen queens. Mail & Guardian. [O].

Available: https://mg.co.za/article/2018-08-17-00-riseof-the-shebeen-queens/ Accessed 31 March 2021.

3.) Takezawa, Y (2004). Race. Building the myth of Black inferiority. [O].

Available: https://www.britannica.com/topic/racehuman/Building-the-myth-of-Black-inferiority Accessed 08 October 2021.

4.) Unknown. Your Bantu Servant and You. The Non-European Affairs Department. Issued: April 1962.

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L-2: The Township Truths, site plan, rendered line-drawing, 1:10,000.

2021

R-1: Omitted Reality, catalogue, image collage, 1:10.

Shiloh Rakumakwe_M2_SYSTEMIC GROUNDS /

L-1: Perpetuated Truths, section, image collage, 1:5,000.

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Brighton Matambo

CARTOGRAPHIES OF MASCULINITY: Pathway to Redemption.

SITE: SACS High Boys Boarding School, Cape Town

Abstract “There are no masculinities without culture: all masculinities are fixed to culture, place and time”, explains Professor Kopano Ratele in his book Liberating Masculinities. Here, ‘masculinity’ refers to a pattern of cultural practices by which men are defined within a society.

Colonisation introduced boarding schools for boys on the African continent, designed to assimilate indigenous groups to the hegemonic cultural practices of their colonizers.

This negation of indigenous cultural practises, as experienced by Xhosa peoples in both the Western and Eastern Cape (due to their high population there) plays out in SACS High School, the country’s first boarding school and the research’s site of inquiry. There, architecture is used as a social weapon to render culture static, maintaining its ideological position that then constantly informs human behaviour in space.

At the scales of 1:50 and 1:1, the project investigates the cultural conditionings at SACS High School, to establish hegemonic masculinity cultures that are institutionalized through built form.

The project proposes an architecture that changes that form, and transforms boys into men by reflecting different cultures of masculinities that they will engage with in different times and places. It introduces movable frames that can be reconfigured to suit their dynamic spatial needs. This space is introduced to expose hegemonic masculinity and to force it to negotiate its spatial performance in space.

Brighton Matambo_M2_SYSTEMIC GROUNDS /

2021

M2

R: Hegemonic Masculinity at SACS High_ Objectification, narrative perspectives, collage, 1:1.

The work, since last year, has shown a keen interest in biblical texts. The author believes himself to be an evangelist, and even though the thematic focus was surrounding masculinity, as with last year, the evangelical leanings provided the ideological frame of approach to the theme.

The work investigates the relationship of architecture and space to the sustained production of hegemonic masculinity. It draws on the works of South African Psychology professor Kopano Ratele who states that masculinities are fixed to culture, place, and time. The work argues that architecture is a social weapon used to render culture static and informs cultures of behaviour over sustained periods. The work aims to expose architecture’s complicity in fostering certain kinds of masculinities, while inhibiting/threatening others, at the intimate scale of ritual and performance.

The first case study around performances of hypermasculinity was conducted on the Muhammad AliGeorge Foreman fight of 1974. This study included translations of Ali’s public performances and hazings of Foreman. Both mapping and collage were used to explore the moments both before the fight, and leading up to it, as well as immediately after it, at the press conferences.

The work demarcates a clear scope and set of definitions surrounding formulations of masculinity.

These include: - ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, which is the configuration of gender practice that embodies the currently accepted form of masculinity and its exultation, - ‘Patriarchal masculinity’ which is described by Kopano Ratele as heterosexual masculinity focussed on the dominance of women and children by men, and - ‘Democratic manhood’, which is manhood that is not based on obsessive self-control, defensive exclusion, or frightened escape as defined by sociology professor Michael Kimmel.

At its core, the project is interested in arguing for space for masculinities that contrast hegemonic white masculinity. The study of the Xhosa initiation school typology, its spatiality, and sites of its ritual is one such example.

The interest grounds itself in the study of male boarding schools, which acts as a typological container through which to investigate the production of the practice of manhood. The boarding school typology was introduced to Cape Town by British colonial forces to train black boys, through Christianity, into assimilating to what became the new dominant culture, toward overriding their existing indigenous trainings toward masculinity. They believed that native populations could only become human (with human being synonymous with Christian) if they are separated from their culture.

For this purpose, what became essential was to establish a typology that removes children from their homes to be placed in boarding schools of training. These schools were at its core a ‘civilizing’ tool in the colonial project, designed to isolate, and then erase and reprogram young native boys toward the dominant colonial culture. Of all the boarding schools in Cape Town, 75% are boys’ schools.

The proposition is located at the very first boarding school that was introduced to South Africa, SACS High Boy’s Boarding School. This site is approached as a site of hegemonic masculinity production and practice that still to this present day negates indigenous forms of selfidentification.

One of the research artifacts that was brought in was a published interview of an alumnus of the school wherein the interviewee describes his experience at SACS High School and particularly emphasises his initiation into the school through hazing. This story and the rituals of initiation mentioned in the interview get superimposed over sourced imagery and footage of the school. Through storytelling and symbolism, the school’s Virtual Open Day marketing video gets hijacked, to have it contain much more explicitly the hidden messaging surrounding the culture of masculinity within the school

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2021

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B-L: Toxic Masculinity at the Ring, Triptych, narrative perspectives, collage, 1:100,000.

T-R: Hegemonic Masculinity at SACS High_Weeding, narrative perspective, collage,1:1.

that reflect covertly through hazing traditions. These practices are identified as ‘Weeding’, ‘Fagging’, and ‘Objectification’.

The work proposes a haven for grade 8 learners entering the boarding school and bases this on a typological study of the biblical sanctuary typology given to Israelites in the book of Exodus. This religious frame is proposed as a way to subvert the historical relationship that Christianity has had to civility and training, to introduce a restorative function to it.

-

-

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Detailed typological, character and material studies of the biblical sanctuary built by God to redeem mankind from sin follows, and the sanctuary is interpreted as a place of protection. The material study demonstrates possible translations of hierarchy within the sanctuary through weathering and non-weathering materials.

The haven is located above the dorm rooms, and their entry staircases are concealed within cupboards, shower cubicles and toilet cubicles. This hideout provides safety in the event of raids, bullying and attack events. It comprises of some of the following programmes: - Retreat Storage Wall, where students assemble their food storage space (in case of theft by bullies).

- Assembly Storage Wall, where students assemble their clothing and stationary storage

B-L

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B-R: Hegemonic Masculinity at SACS High_ Fagging, narrative perspectives, collage, 1:1.

space.

Assembly Closet, where students are provided with varying degrees of privacy through modules that are put together in ways that suit the user’s preferences.

Eye Gaze Booth, where two students are made to confront one another as a way to break through preconceived notions about one other, to engage beyond identity, background, status, body stature, and so on.

Parallel Play Booth, which enables play to occur between people in parallel with one another, without any direct verbal or physical interaction. In this process, older and younger students are paired and tasked to produce work using similar mediums with an aim to produce different outputs, as their work reflects their unique influences. This facilitates peer-to-peer learning through observation toward producing masculinity maps. These maps comprise of the choreographies of older male figures that help their younger counterparts to navigate masculinity by example/through modelling.

Making Booth, where two students join together to produce work by assigning each other tasks at different stages within the process of making. This confronts masculinity to suspend its sometimes static notions of being, to engage ides of the ‘Other’.

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S: The Sanctuary, ritual choreography, line-drawing, 1:00.

L

L: Assembly Chamber, materials palette, perspective, 1:1.

T-R: Safe Haven_Spheres of the Safe Haven, axonometric drawing, line-drawing, 1:100.

B-R: Safe Haven_Performances & Actors, ritual choreography, axonometric drawing, 1:1 & 1:100.

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References 1.) Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities. [Sl]: Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data, pp.77-178.

2.) National Geographic encyclopedia (2020) Map. [O].

Available: https://www.nationalgeographic.org Accessed 30 March 2021.

3.) Ratele, K. 2016. Liberating masculinities. [Sl]: HSRC Press, pp.70-87.

4.) Smith, A. 2009. Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study, pp.3-10. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. [O].

Available: https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/E_C_19_2009_crp1.pdf Accessed 29 March 2021.

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Liso Mdiya

GENDER GEOGRAPHY:

From Rural Tales to Kitchen Realities, Toward a Reconfiguration of Gendered Cultural Classifications.

SITE: eMantlaneni Village, Eastern Cape

Abstract Social theologist, Barney Warf, states how ‘gender geography’1 has long been recognized as an important social tool that constructs the realities of black women’s lives. It does not manifest as an intrinsic system of choice but rather highlights that it is enforced in the lifetime of black women.

The investigation analyses the conditions of the experiences of Xhosa women at eMantlaneni village in the Eastern Cape. The project maps architecture’s complicity in the ‘social classification’2 of black women, i.e., how architecture aids in subjugating Xhosa women through the cultural and gendered ‘Reed Dance’ ritual, overseen by authority figures within the village’s hierarchical structures.

The project proposes ways to rearrange architecture to trouble patriarchal systems embedded in traditional Xhosa spaces. This aims to reconfigure the spatial programming wherein the Reed Dance takes place through a traditional camp that disrupts the practice, and allows Xhosa women the opportunity to claim their identities out of the public orchestrated pedestal of the Dance.

1 Gender

geography as the social construction of gender has often been compared with sex, which refers to the biological differences between men and women.

2 Social classification refers to the grouping of people within a society who possess the same economic status. In this context it refers to the status of black women.

Liso Mdiya_M1_SYSTEMIC GROUNDS /

2021

M1

R: Ukusinda, collage, photograph, pen & cut-outs, 1:1.

The work takes a keen interest in social classification and ‘gender geography’ that, according to social theologist Barney Warf, acts as an important social tool that constructs the realities of women’s lives. The work expands on this by looking at how these classifications shape the experiences of black women in both urban spaces – where they become invisible – and rural settings, where they become hyper-visible to their elders and male counterparts. The work is interested in the relationship of architecture and space to the sustained production of traditional cultural gender roles, which create self-regulated systems of oppression.

The work argues that architecture is complicit in formalising oppressive traditional practices through the Xhosa ritual of Inciyo, or the ‘Reed Dance’, which is compulsory for young girls and women between the ages of 10 to 35. Designed as a cultural training camp, Inciyo centres around the traditional kitchen, which – as a place of basic human sustenance – is rendered unavoidable to young women, and becomes the training ground for compliance. During Inciyo, women’s virginities are tested, and they are taught the ‘correct’ way of dressing, speaking, cleaning and preparing traditional meals, from their choice of ingredients to the plating of the meal.

The work’s introductory study titled The Recipe of Informality is an installation that looks at the tools that Xhosa women are expected to use in Xhosa rural kitchens. These traditional tools were juxtaposed with what are deemed modern Western tools, to reveal the practices of delegitimization that arise from the disparity between those tools. This study was the first dive into the policing of ritual practice toward a derivation of legitimacy.

The work consistently aims to expose architecture’s complicity in rendering certain practices invalid – such as demonstrated in other early works that look at informal traders in Johannesburg CBD, where they are rendered infrastructurally invisible due to a lack of permanent and/or formal civic resources from which they can operate. Here, informality is equated to invalidity.

Building on these earlier works, the proposition speaks to, and acts in defence of, a young female Xhosa audience, and proposes a reconfiguration of the Inciyo ritual. In the Eastern Cape village of eMantlaneni, where the proposition is sited, Inciyo is situated on the chief ’s property and places the kitchen across the kraal, where the male family members and friends of the chief spend most of their free time. This organizational structure places the kitchen under constant scrutiny for the duration of the girls’ weekly lessons.

Through gradual reprogramming over time, the design orchestrates a series of disruptions to the currently inherited spatial practices within the village by, for example, reimagining the entry to the chief ’s homestead to be much wider and inviting, thus rescripting the young women’s timid entry into their site of instruction.

These subtle architectural moves allow for women to reclaim their identities through the Reed Dance, which has previously been intimidating and overly prescriptive.

The work operates on the sectional scale of 1:50, where boundaries between spaces like the kraal and kitchen are investigated, as well as the site scale of 1:200, which places Inciyo within the context of the chief ’s property.

The intervention also reprogrammes the practices of the onlooking men, as they are made to undergo a similar process of training and are subconsciously encouraged to participate in the camp. The proposed wall that separates the kitchen from the kraal encourages men to leave the kraal, step closer, kneel, crouch and even lie down in order to observe the camp proceedings – thereby rescripting the surveillance of the kitchen.

In further articulating the Inciyo ritual, a list of codified artifacts is outlined, as well as a character study of its participants. The ritual choreography is also performed and narrated and outlines the components of Inciyo.

The work was greatly advantaged by grounding itself within a familiar site and ritual practice to and of the author. That proximity and intimate knowledge inspired a series of subtle yet impactful interventions.

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T-L: Value of Belonging, B-L: Recipe of Informality, sectional collage, photograph, taxonomized catalogue, pen & paint, 1:5,000. photograph of live display, 1:1.

VALUE OF BELONGING Comparative Opposites

T-L

LHS pavement - A transitional space in the city where the woman belongs.

RHS service road - Movement and progression, a space she is erased from.

LHS orange silhoutte of woman - How she is placed in trasitional space.

The orange silhouette is disfigured on the RHS because she has no place at all.

RECIPE OF INFORMALITY

B-L

CONTAINED /noun/ control or restrain (oneself or a feeling)

UNITY /noun/ state of being united or joined as a whole

VISUALIZATION These sketches show progression of how I intercepted and interrupted the narrative of an existing story-telling segment on Umhlobo Wenene FM hosted by Gcina Mhlophe. The first line drawings has no faces, no emotion, no character. Progression through the story line is shown through the additions of characters. Where the story teller is visible, that is where I interrupt the story of Nonzwakazi from a typical Xhosa woman’s story to how the back woman takes charge

00:07 Umhlobo Wenene Intro

00:57 Kwasuka sukela, Chosi !

01:38 Umfazi othobela umyeni yakhe

02:07 Nam’ ! Nam’ ndiyafuna

02:59 No my dear !

03:19 This is a lesson to you my children

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L: Etiquette reimagined, plan, line-drawing, 1:50.

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L: Inciyo, site plan, linedrawing, 1:500.

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00:13 | LAYING THEM OUT

01:18 | PROTEIN PLATED FIRST

00:00 | GATHERING INGREDIENTS

01:03 | PLATING COMMENCES

FRAGMENTS OF JUDGEMENT

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01:54 | STARCH PLATED LAST

00:32 | COOKING RITUAL

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R: Fragments of Judgement, ritual choreography, storyboard of narrated film, 1:1.

L: Ritual props, codified artifacts, photograph, 1:1.

CODIFIED ARTIFACTS

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Inqawe / Pipe

Respect

Horse dung

Wealth

Enamel plate

Reward

Unqawo / Pot

Labour

1.) Warf, B. 2010. General Geography, Earth & Society.

SAGE Publications, Inc. New York.

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References

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Thembeka Mpolweni

TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE. SITE: Alberta Street, Cape Town

Abstract Architecture is the material and spatial evidence of systems of control. In this system, service infrastructure is used as a tool in political warfare. In the context of refugee shelters in South Africa, it manifests itself in temporary structures that don’t include service amenities, thus promoting tactics of discomfort. These tactics are then aided and perpetuated through forms of representation. Figures of authority use interrogation, surveillance, policing and other complex strategies of control to possess and maintain order.

The project explores – both at the personal and state scale – the way that figures of authority create and maintain a state of fear and consequence as protection against presumed or suspected future acts of terror.

The research explores how territories of disobedience can be created as a defence for architectures of compliance through the proposal of a Service Park in Cape Town. The ‘park’ as an urban typology is explored due to its historical uses as a tool that address social issues across generations, as they evolve every 30 – 50 years.

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R: Surveillance - Entrance into Heterotopia, collection of components, collage with linedrawing, photo & perspex, 1:1.

The work defines architecture as the material and spatial evidence of systems of control. It is interested in the ways that terror and disobedience are enabled by architecture through sites of compliance such as interrogation rooms. The range of mediums for the research spanned across analytical drawings, collages, sensory models, and performance-based experiments.

These modes allowed the inquiry to span the ideological, urban, and the intimate scale of the body simultaneously.

The narrative device of the portfolio is an evidential catalogue in which territories and tactics of compliance and disobedience are documented. Its initial study is of the interrogation room as a heterotopia wherein architecture sets the scene for instigating fear and cooperation. The typological definition then gets expanded to the author’s grandmother’s house – and the TV room in particular – through analytical drawings that translate the way that the author’s grandmother’s gaze and suspicion of her plays out. What emerged from this study was a 1:1 gazing device that replicates the grandmother’s gaze upon her body in a performed recreation of the TV room scenario in the design studio. In this way, the work produces several audiences simultaneously.

The work delved into profiling and legitimacy and how this is spatially produced – sometimes by narrative coercion and at other times by choreographed spatial use. While on site in Cape Town, what became of geographic interest is the eviction of Congolese refugees from Greenmarket Square to a site in Maitland by the City of Cape Town during the hard-lockdown and state of emergency in 2020. There was a breakthrough in representation through the process of conducting the site study of the relocated refugee camp, located between Wingfield military base and Maitland cemetery.

The project documents the precarity of the site conditions through tactile models and acts as a gateway to the work’s definition of ‘tactics of discomfort’. The tactile models were photographed and collaged to reveal how narratives of space become orchestrated through image-making. In populating the collages, the image

composition process made use of specific Google searches to uncover the biased gaze of the media upon black refugees.

The privilege experiment was then introduced an extension of this representational mode where - through a performance-based experiment, a series of models, and a purely audio film, the sensorial is brought in as a rendering tool of the site through the use of sound and smell. The experiment builds intimacy between the audience and the site by suspending visual cues and focussing on the olfactory and aural capacities of the participants. It asks them to respond to their constual proximity to the state’s tactics of discomfort that have been enforced on the camp through the deprivation of access to basic service amenities.

The map of disobedience follows from that as a coded device disguised as a carrier bag to help refugees navigate and access amenities in the surrounding area.

The work proposes a Service Park, inspired by the pattern observed around refugee housing typologies, where they commonly lack all basic service amenities that can contribute to a migrant’s sense of ease in their temporary settlement. This pattern of infrastructural drought mirrors South Africa’s post-apartheid ongoing crisis of service delivery to the most destitute – who are predominantly black – where this lack establishes a permanent incapacity to settle.

These observations inspire the research’s trajectory into the democratization of service access, for which a public park typology as a public-facing amenity proves a productive typological container, due to how it that has historically offered disruptions to the practices of exclusivity and monopolized access to service amenities.

The Park is proposed as a defence against the state’s tactical deployment of services as a tool of political campaigning and warfare.

The Park is sited on Alberta Street in Cape Town to bring the plight of refugees onto the doorstep of governmental institutions such as the Police, the

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L: Map of Disobedience, cartographic map, embroidery & photoshop, 1:500.

Department of Home Affairs, and the city Magistrate’s Court.

Politicians holding office in these institutions typically use service delivery as their campaign ticket. The Park is disguised as a refreshment space for citizens who participate in civic activities in the precinct. At the same time, it provides a point of access to basic services L

and amenities. It includes programs such as cooking, playing, and sanitation, which were identified in earlier explorations of the refugee camp as critically absent amenities.

The Park explores how, through architecture, territories of disobedience can be insurgently situated in defence against the state’s lobbying and campaigning tactics.

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S: History of Parks, timeline, collage, 1:10,000.

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R: Fragments of Judgement, ritual choreography, storyboard of narrated film, 1:1.

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B-R: Services, axonometric, REVIT & photoshop, 1:20.

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Ntombizethu Shube

[DE]CONSTRUCTING UTOPIA. SITE: The Company Gardens, the Slave Lodge, the Burgher Watchhouse, and the House of Parliament, Cape Town

Abstract Architecture is the practice of legitimizing social structures of power; conceptualizing the world through its symbols, images, and meanings. It is a means to consolidate ideologies of race, gender, and class, and is a way of communication – a kind of spatial text – that is usually more effective in conveying ideas than language.

The research’s Major Design Project is centered on South African utopias, which are here identified as privatized territories of whiteness. These territories – maintained by black labour – exist as ideal societies for white South Africans to live in peace amongst themselves, where apartheid social hierarchies are re-enacted.

Utopia’s enmeshment with middle-class black South Africans is crucial in the obfuscation of apartheid’s evolution and transmutation and the violent myth of a ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. The research investigates past and present spatial productions of Cape Town’s inner city to reveal the continuity of architecture augmenting white hegemony and reproducing systems of exclusion, ordering, censoring and vigilance.

The project deconstructs the typologies of utopia through maps, to then propose a rite of passage that would transition between utopia and the abyssal plains that poor black South Africans become expelled to, and transition us into new futures beyond colonialism and imperialism. Through this proposed rite of passage, a new map is constructed that renders the spatial text of utopia unintelligible. This liminal space of altered forms and new relations occur at the scales of 1:1, 1:2,000 and 1:5,000, and is an attempt at destabilizing white hegemony.

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R: South African Utopias, component drawing, axonometric mixed media drawing, not to scale.

The work’s interest this year has grounded itself in the formulations of utopic urban forms along racial lines in South Africa, as architecture is approached as the practice of legitimizing social structures of power, and conceptualizes the world through its symbols, images, and meanings.

Historically white-designated zones are investigated through the typology of forts, or privatized territories (of whiteness) that function as defence bases and that mark people of colour (POC) as the enemies to keep out. These territories are maintained by black labour and exist as ideal societies for white South Africans to live in peace amongst themselves, where apartheid social hierarchies can be peacefully re-enacted. Through dioramas as the primary medium, the work unravels the façade dependency that utopic conditions have and articulates the country’s utopias of whiteness as stage sets comprised of a series of flattened façade components.

The diorama languages the front- and backends of both the utopic constructions, as well as the work as a whole, and with this, the portfolio is divided into 2 parts: Suburbia, which contains the backend elements of the set, props and scene; and Metropolis, which unmasks the fort and recodes utopia.

The work first presents a series of dioramas of the author’s own housing estate, where its very repetitive components that are standardized by housing estate typologies as a whole in South Africa are catalogued.

Having a river edge (or infrastructural buffer) that operates like a moat around the estate, separate entries for different classes of citizens, vegetated boundaries that obscure their sight of barren landscapes, and security guards as added infrastructural components are just some of those recurring components.

The dioramas were initially built within a contained box that shows nothing beyond it to articulate its isolated island-like manner, that produces a condition that could locate itself anywhere as long as it has its protective elements of containment, and access and

motion regulation. This echoes the meaning of the term ‘utopia’, coined in 1516 by Thomas More, which is defined as a place of ideal perfection, especially in laws, government and social conditions (Thomas More’s Utopia, n.d.). Its etymology stems from the Greek words, ou and topos, which translate to a ‘non-place’, or ‘nowhere’.

The work reckons with the concentric-like scalar application of utopic formations, from the scale of city, to suburb, to building. As a building case study, Monte Casino in Fourways, Johannesburg was investigated, due to its attempt at replicating the original Monte Cassino compound in Italy. The work is languaged through a film that at a certain stage blurs the distinctions between both sites, making their differences almost indistinguishable.

For the Major Design Project, the work grounds itself in several sites simultaneously, where each site operates as components within the greater urban construction of Cape Town city as a utopia. This becomes the third scale of utopia that the work introduces, and demonstrates how profoundly layered and self-reinforcing the system of fortification of hegemonic whiteness is.

A matrix of key components of utopia is established, which includes, in order: 1. Sublime landscapes, or pristine gardens. The work quotes an instruction from the VOC to Jan van Riebeeck upon arrival in the Cape that led to The Company’s Garden – where South Africa’s Parliament resides – and the founding of the Cape Colony. The quote states that “As soon as you are in a proper state of defence, you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest grounds in which everything sown will thrive well, which gardens shall be properly en­closed...” (Brand, 2016).

This approach to land was about demarcating it as a terra nullius, or a ‘no-man’s land’, and the sublime landscape component cements the diorama as the fitting medium for the work due to its inherent function as a producer of

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B-L: South African Utopias, front elevation, diorama, not to scale.

R: Building Utopia, axonometric context map, digital line-drawing, 1:5,000.

pristine landscapes.

2. The second of the components is the Abyssal Plains, derived from Portuguese economist Baoventura de Sousa Santos (2007) articulations of abyssal thinking as modern western thinking. He articulates abyssal thinking as radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line”. The division is such that “the other side of the line” vanishes as reality, becomes non-existent, and is indeed produced as non-existent. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line (de Sousa Santos, 2007). This frame is used to articulate the positioning of slave labour and black South Africans in the country’s various iterations of colonial fortification.

3. The third of the components is the Watch B-L

Dogs, which is about surveillance and policing, and 4. the fourth is the Ruling Elites, for which the entire system serves to protect and to maintain their positioning.

On the basis of this matrix are the sites of intervention chosen, so The Company Gardens as the Sublime Landscape, the Slave Lodge as the Abyssal Plain, the Burgher Watchhouse as the Watch Dogs, and the House of Parliament as the Ruling Elites.

What is proposed is a new map of the city as a rite of passage that provides a transition between utopia, and the abyssal plains as a democratic necessity that re-storys utopia. This notion of re-storying (which is a play on words) is articulated in a diagram by Walter T. Davis as a necessary act for oppressive states to undergo the process of what he calls “finding their souls” (Davis, 1994).

1. The Company’s Garden (est. in 1652) The VOC established the Cape Colony as a ‘refreshment station’ for ships traveling East. Jan van Riebeeck was instructed to establish vegetable gardens for this purpose, these then became ‘The Company’s Gardens’.

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2. Slave Lodge (built in 1660s) The establishment of the colony and the gardens necessitated a labour force.

Within seven weeks of landing at the Cape, van Riebeeck wrote to the VOC requesting enslaved labour for his settlement. The rst slaves arrived in 1654.

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4. Houses of Parliament (built in 1885) The elites of the Cape Colony are referred to as the ‘Cape Gentry’, they owned land, slaves and could exercise political power. Under British control, this power was formalized through the establishment of the rst parliament.

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3. Burgher Watch House & Square (built in 1696) Fresh fruit and vegetables were sold in the square by the slaves. The colony was patrolled by the Freeburghers who were stationed at the Burgher Watch House and the slaves were surveilled from here.

Building Utopia (Cape Town) Perspective Site Map Line Drawing :2 

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Sublime Landscapes

Abyssal Plains

The Watchdogs

Ruling Elites

Utopias Four Tenets Front Elevation Line Drawing 1:2 

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The Company's Lands Lands of Free Burghers The Company's Forts Lands of Company's Servants Agriculture Beach Topography Van Riebeeck's Hedge Coastal Border Water Canals Rivers / Streams Brick Kiln Boundary Wall

References 1.) Bl.uk. n.d. Thomas More’s Utopia. [O].

Available at: https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/ item126618.html Accessed 14 August 2021.

2.) Brand, J., 2016. A Short History of the Company’s Garden, Cape Town. [O]. Theheritageportal.co.za.

Available at: https://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/short-history-companys-garden-cape-town Accessed 9 March 2021.

3.) Davis, W., 1994. Shattered dream. Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International.

4.) de Sousa Santos, B., 2007. Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges. REVIEW (Fernand Braudel Centre), [O]. 30(1), pp.45-89.

Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40241677 Accessed 13 May 2021.

5.) Dovey, K. 1999. Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, Routledge.

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SACRED GROUNDS adj.

1.regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular faith, group or individual.

2. regarded as too valuable to be interefered with; sacrosanct.

000 M2 Rituals of Muted Labours: The Sexual Objectification of Women’s Bodies in Strip Clubs.

DIMPHO SELEPE 000 M2 Kukwami La: Department of Land Reform.

THANDEKA MNGUNI 000 M2 Custodianship of Paradise: Counter-Mapping Ancestral Land and Legacies.

TUKI MATHIBEDI 000 M2 Watropolis: Subverted Narratives of Ritual Disorder.

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Dimpho Selepe

RITUALS OF MUTED LABOURS:

The Sexual Objectification of Women’s Bodies in Strip Clubs.

SITE: Mavericks Gentlemen’s Club, Cape Town CBD

Abstract The project investigates the societal myth of women’s sexuality and bodies not belonging to themselves, existing rather as a tool of service to society for the purpose of procreation, male pleasure and consumption.

The work approaches architecture as an enabler of the sexual objectification of women in space, as it reflects women as bodily appendages (Mulvey, 1985) by designing spaces that prioritize the male experience (Longhurst 1999, 157). Men control space, because they gaze upon the [women] within the space (Mulvey, 1985) and women appear in these ‘male spaces’ as decoration (Rosewarne, 2005:70).

There is an ongoing practice of women being expected to subordinate their own will for the sexual gratification of the opposite sex in strip clubs (Dworkin, 1997), even in spaces that claim to provide women with sexual autonomy (Weitzer, 2005). The project investigates the ritual practice of stripping as a ritual that upholds patriarchy in its most essential form; because women’s bodies are sexually exploited and commoditized (Rosewarne, 2005:71).

The project highlights three tiers of transgression present in strip clubs. The first is forms of stress and tension through pulling, grabbing and choking of dancers, the second is non-consensual touching of genitals and the third is transgression through rape.

The project is investigated at the scale of the body, and the scale of 1:100 to understand the body’s relationship to space. The project proposes an extension to Mavericks Club’s programmes as a defence against the female body as publicly trangressable by producing a space where exotic dancers are able to step into an armature that acts as their second skin and operates in sync with their bodies, allowing them to create distance from their clienteles, as they are rendered free to violate that second skin.

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R: Nylon as Skin, photographed model, nylon, polyester and rope, 1:10.

The work’s thematic interest is rooted in the ways that society positions the female body as an extension of the public realm that can be occupied and transgressed without permission. The work attempts to re(member) the dismembered and captive nature of women’s bodies.

The work this year turned its lens from a woman’s trained body in the domestic realm, to women’s sexualized bodies in the public realm. What was investigated was the societal myth of women’s sexuality not belonging to themselves, but existing as a tool of service to society for the purpose of procreation, and male pleasure and consumption.

The research very early on sited itself in the strip club typology, and located itself particularly at Mavericks Club in Cape Town. There, the ways that women’s professional limits are transgressed even in the context of sexuality-as-currency is explored. The work approaches stripping as a practice that, according to Australian Women’s Studies scholar Lauren Rosewarne, upholds patriarchy in its most essential form, as there, women’s bodies are consumed as commodities in their rawest sense, which complicates the scope of negotiations that must usually be made regarding bodily transgression. Although it is understood that for some women, stripping is done by choice, there are still questions surrounding ways to mitigate the physical, psychological and sociological harm of the industry due to how it programmes gendered bodies’ relationships to one another.

To better understand the thresholds of the strip club as a heterotopia, the work first explores their binary formulations, paralleling it with a fashion show for its performative and display characteristics of women as objects like mannequins, where, like stripping, clothing acts as their second skin, or the body’s façade or structural system. The strip club typology is also paralleled to a church setting that holds overlapping heterotopic characteristics of embodying different sets of moral and performance standards that do not necessarily apply outside of those spaces. Overlaps between stripping and the blesser/blessee culture

was articulated, as they share performance, attire and location-specificity as some key overlapping characteristics.

A lack of operational transparency was mapped when visiting Maverick’s Club during the Unit’s field trip to Cape Town, due to its effect on worker vulnerability as a result of the establishment and industry’s difficulty in being regulated. One such way that this lack of transparency occurs is through the banning of all photographs. As a result of this, Memory Drawings were produced, where recollected memories of the experience of the club were drawn with eyes closed, for 2-5 minutes without lifting the pen. This practice is used to recollect visual memory in its clearest, uninterrupted, and untainted form.

The research’s first installation, titled he hustles my body, I hustle his pocket, builds a projection of Maverick’s Club, where with nylon stockings as the placeholder for skin and body, gendered entitlements to the female body are able to be tested and given vocabulary.

Parallel to this, one of the secondary mediums from last year, embroidery, is revisited. This practice started historically as a language of the conquering victor, where the wives of the conquerors would embroider what their husbands brought back from their colonized countries, to hang them on their walls as trophies.

A breakthrough was made when the 1:1 installation model was scaled down a 1:50 tactile model, as it allowed a better capacity to orchestrate the relationship between the model and the bodies acting upon the model. This introduced experiments that engage notions of gazes, tension, penetration, constriction and facading.

The work proposes an extension to Mavericks Club’s programmes as a defense against the female body as publicly transgressable by producing a space where strippers are able to step into a second skin that operates in sync with their body’s vocabulary and form, allowing them to create distance from their clientele as they are free to violate that second skin.

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T-L: Conceptualing the Second Skin Atmosphere, perspective, fineliner, not to scale.

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B-L: Conceptualing the Second Skin 2, sections, fineliner, not to scale.

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References 1.) Dworkin, A. 1997. Prostitution and Male Supremacy. Life and Death. New York p. 138-216 2.) Longhurst, R. 1999. Gendering space. In Richard Le Heron, Laurence Murphy, Pip Forer, & Margaret Goldston’s Explorations in human geography: Encountering space. Oxford: Auckland.

3.) Mulvey, L. 1985. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Bill Nichols, Movies and methods, Vol. 2.

Berkeley, USA: University of California.

4.) Rosewarne, L. 2005. The Men’s Gallery. Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 67– 78.

5.) Weitzer, R. 2009. Sociology of Sex Work. Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 35, p.213-234.

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Thandeka Mnguni

KUKWAMI LA:

Department of Land Reform.

SITE: Clifton 4th Beach, Cape Town

Abstract The work’s myth of violence is surrounding racialized ownership. The research theme grounds itself in the ideologies constructed by ‘petty apartheid’, which allowed white Afrikaans South Africans to claim ownership of public spaces during the apartheid political era. Through this theme, the work defines architecture as an act of announcing and mark-marking towards deriving forms of ownership and territory. The project’s site of interest is Clifton 4th Beach; a public space still battling ideologies of white ownership.

The work approaches ownership as a fluid condition that can be produced both through dispute and a lack thereof. The work explores and reveals forms of racialized ownership within the beach by proposing a new Department of Land Reform whose mission is to transform land ownership patterns and meanings. As a defense against laws and rules that do not allow it to exist within the beach, the work proposes an alternative land claim application. In the proposed application people who are displaced during the slave, colonization and apartheid oppressive systems – even though they don’t have claim to the land in a normative way – are able to access claim to land based on a different yet culturally precedented and grounded system, with the capacity to challenge racialized ownership.

The research is conducted through image-making, sound collection and video.

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The work’s interest over the past two years lies in the consequences of colonial erasure on our understanding, approach and relationship to space, as according to missionary Edwin Smith, colonial erasure was not effective because of how well cultural artifacts were destroyed, but how they dismembered it by re-ordering, hierarchising, discarding, omitting, dissociating, superimposing, grafting, and banning them. With this as research grounding, the body of work presents black South Africans as living museums through the psychological phenomenon of ‘transactive memory’.

The year’s research delved into the racialized myth of ownership, where the inquiry was grounded in the racial takeover of public amenities (also known as ‘petty apartheid’) that was legislated under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act 49 of 1953 to regulate racial contact in public spaces. This Act included “park benches, public toilets, beaches, swimming pools, and even graveyards” as in service to white people in their exclusive public spaces (Rogerson, 2017: 94), and this separation was rarely manifest just through architectural definition. These boundary formations have retained their strength even in the post-apartheid era, in part due to the very nature of their invisibility, as their cultural programming sustains the practices that they historically put in place.

The year’s research inquiry kicked off at an exploration of forms of announcing ownership through a childhood game called Umxoxiso, which is a common narrative performance game for black South African children, primarily in township settings. It allows the children to cross the invisible boundaries set by systems such as ‘petty apartheid’, as they narratively locate themselves within prohibited territories, to claim their terms of occupation of it. The game depends on the real conditions of ownership and territory to set the conditions of ownership of the game.

The work then explores challenges to ownership through an immersive study of a ‘#FeesMustFall’ protest at WITS university outside the Solomon Mahlangu Hall, on its square. The project looks at how

both the students and the police announce and challenge each other’s temporary ownership of that square during the protest and presents the different types of announcements both sides used during the protest.

As a continuity of that, the research expanded its scope to include Clifton 4th Beach in Cape Town, that acts as and is treated as the backyard or extension of historically white private territories. Borrowing again from the Umxoxiso game – but an earlier iteration of it – language is given to the temporal occurrence of the sheep slaughter protest on the beach that occurred in December 2018.

A future is projected for the beach through the idea of asserting ownership, where a scenario is put forward that Nongqawuse – a Xhosa prophetess – appears to Jan van Riebeeck’s descendants disguised as him, and brings them an important message to return back home to their place of origin. Nongqawuse is a prophetess of the sea who told her people to drown their cattle, kill their crops and burn their homes. She claimed that after they do all of that, all the dead of the Xhosa nation will rise again and will come up out of the sea, bringing newness with them.

The work’s proposition asks, “what if ?”; what if the prophecy came true, and all the dead did rise to rescript the beach, i.e., white territorialized space.

The work explores and reveals ongoing forms of racialized ownership within Clifton 4th beach by proposing a new Department of Land Reform whose mission is to transform land ownership patterns and meanings. In this department, Nongqawuse is a minister. As a defence against laws and rules that once prohibited indigenous forms of cultural practice that were about geographic rootedness, the proposition looks at the application of land claim, and utilises the ritual of ukuphahla (the summoning of ancestors) as an application process, with the intention of challenging racialised ownership. The work also makes sense of the material consequences of conjuring the spiritual realm within that territory.

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1.) Burdsey, D. 2016. Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge. [O].

Available: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057% 2F978-1-137-45012-8 Accessed 21 May 2021 2.) Government Gazette of the republic of South Africa. 1990. [O].

Available: https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_ document/201503/act-100-1990.pdf Accessed 19 July 2021 3.) Rodgerson, J.M. 2017. Kicking Sand in the Face of Apartheid: Segregated Beaches in South Africa. Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series 35(35):93-110. [O].

Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/bog-2017-0007.

Accessed 21 May 2021.

4.) SABC News. 2018. Sangoma explains slaughtering, cleansing at Clifton beach. [Video recording]. [O].

Available: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vR475n0301U Accessed 8 April 2021.

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S: Materialising the Ancestors, diagram, line-drawing/images, not to scale.

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L-3: Ancestral world, site plan, R-3: Ancestral World, section, line-drawing, 1:500. line-drawing, 1:500.

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Tuki Mathibedi

CUSTODIANSHIP OF PARADISE: Counter-Mapping Ancestral Land and Legacies.

SITE: The Rivers Urban Park in Observatory and Llandudno beach, Cape Town

Abstract According to the State Land Audit of 2017, the majority of land in South Africa is still owned by white people and is located in economic generating territories, while the country’s indigenous groups – who also make up the majority in numbers – own far less and are located in territories that are far away from economic activity (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform of SA, 2018).

Architectural elements such as buildings, and physical and natural boundaries are used to legitimize territories that dictate who is awarded permission, ownership, and belonging, and who is not.

The work investigates architecture’s complicity in the bureaucratic production of land ownership, which operates alongside instruments such as legislated land laws, title deeds & town-planning schemes. The work approaches these instruments as fictions.

The work posits that architecture remains a tool to maintain boundaries of marginalization and the work investigates ways to infiltrate those boundaries.

The project explores spaces anchored around Khoi & San sacred sites within Cape Town, as ceremonial sites of intervention. Through an urban design framework, the proposal maps a seasonal network of spiritual ceremonies through a Festival Procession of Claims. The ritual practice of these ceremonies begins to infiltrate the surrounding territory, distorting the city’s cartography to generate a new form of landscape.

The proposition focusses on Cape Town at the ideological scale, as well as the urban scale where the festival procession takes place. It also articulates rituals at the scale of the body; connecting two sites.

The first site is The Rivers Urban Park in Observatory, and the other is Llandudno beach.

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R: Alternative Sites, Map, line-drawing & image overlay, 1:50,000.

The work is interested in architecture’s complicity in the production of land ownership by operating alongside bureaucratic instruments such as legislated land laws, title deeds and town planning schemes. The research defines these instruments as colonial fictions that play into the myth of private ownership and marginalization of indigenous people. The work posits that architecture is a system of maintaining the boundaries of marginalisation. The work complicates architecture’s relationship to this condition to finds ways to infiltrate these boundaries.

Working as both politician and architect, last year’s proposition was a future presidential inauguration event to instigate a disruption of the rainbow nation branding transition. Through event architecture, the work demonstrates the practice of architecture as both a politic and a fiction.

The portfolio is comprised of 2 parts. Part A, A Campaign of Claims operates as a series of land claims.

These claims reveal the workings of several instruments of land violence and their relationship to architecture and space. Part B, Custodianship of Paradise contains the proposition in four Acts.

Ikapa Lodumo is a game that initiated the year’s inquiry. This game distorts the current map of Cape Town through a question-and-answer game. The city is divided into 9sq km tiles and distributed to the players. Questions based on ideas of Choice, Persuasion and Order, coupled within the categories of Work, Home and Leisure are posed to the players.

The game imagines the first encounter of the Dutch with the indigenous inhabitants of Cape Town, the Gorinaikonas, and the negotiations between the parties for the settlers to displace the indigenous people. The project demonstrates the work’s interest in creating new readings of space through existing spatial material and the real-time method of performative play that is used to arrive at the work’s fictional speculations.

As with last year, personal anecdotes around racialization are used to formulate the research. The work develops

an understanding of the bureaucratic instruments that assign land ownership racially in South Africa through a case study and interview with the author’s grandfather Mkulu Mike Mathibedi. Mkhulu Mathibedi describes his forced removal from Alexandra during apartheid and the ongoing land claim for lots 489 & 490 that he once owned.

The Turns of the Cape project is a part of the work that gets sited at Llandudno beach in Cape Town.

The beach is currently inhabited in summer by the current homeowners, and in winter by black landless people when the majority-white homeowners leave to chase summer in Europe. As a mayor, and through a triptych collage, time, scale, and rituals of ownership are negotiated through design, by orchestrating a mayoral campaign that proposes that those homes be occupied cyclically by different racial and class constituents.

The Moon Dance ritual choreography film then interrogates Llandudno beach through the speculative possibilities of a spiritual ritual. A shell midden that is said to be a site of first encounter between the Dutch and the Khoi and San peoples was unearthed there by archaeologists. These indigenous groups became the focus group of the research for the remainder of the study.

The Major Design Project reorients colonial practices of land occupation and ownership established through the ‘empty land’ myth, which grounds itself on the lie that first peoples were nomadic peoples. This is contrasted in the work by the notion of ‘transhumance’, which is a seasonal movement of first peoples across the landscape, and which describes the real relationship that those first peoples had with their land.

A proposition at several scales is explored. At the ideological scale, the project challenges current fictions of ownership and their architectures that are established by colonialism and that mar the city of Cape Town and the country. At the urban scale, a seasonal network of spiritual ceremonies and processions are proposed through what the work terms A Festival

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B-L: iKapa Lodumo, map, R: Moon Dance, ritual board game, 1:100,000 choreography, storyboard (clickable). of film, 1:1 (clickable).

Procession of Claims. At the scale of the body, particular rituals manifest in space and time through the Festival performance.

A historical account of colonial settlements concerning land as acts of violence against transhumance peoples underscores the proposition. These result in the current racialised spatial patterns of land inhabitation and ownership in Cape Town and South Africa.

The work develops a ritual palette of Khoi & San rituals such as cleansing, healing, leadership transformation and ritual passage to detail the proposed festival, and transposes the ritual practices onto the festival. The proposed ceremony infiltrates the surrounding territory, distorting the city’s cartography to generate a new landscape.

The project revolves around two Khoi and San sacred

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sites in Cape Town. The first is Llandudno beach, and the second is Two Rivers Urban Park, which had recent attention due to contestations between Amazon – who seek to develop the site into a corporate park for their African headquarters – and 180 interest groups including the First Nations Collective the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Indigenous traditional council. The proposition is bookended by these sites and also takes place on seasonal routes mapped out between them.

Key to the colonial and apartheid projects was the erasure of identity and reclassification of people into new groups. The work looks at the erasure of the Khoi and San lineages through these historical processes as a way to uncover who the festival serves. The character palette builds onto this and imagines the figures who would currently occupy the transposed rituals in the Festival.

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S: Float Assembly Drawing, axonometric & assembly drawings, 3D model, 1:100 &1:200 respectively.

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L: Khoi & San Revivalist Lineage, systems catalogue, diagram, 1:100,000.

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References 1.) Du Plessis, W, J. 2011, African indigenous land rights in a private ownership paradigm. [O].

Available: http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/pelj/v14n7/ v14n7a03.pdf Accessed 23 August 2021.

2.) Ford Foundation. n.d. Postcommodity. [O].

Available: https://www.fordfoundation.org/campaigns/ the-art-of-change-meet-our fellows/postcommodity/ Accessed 31 March 2021.

3.) Future Generation Art Prize. 2017. Dineo Seshee Bopape. [O].

Available: https://futuregenerationartprize.org/en/ history/2017/dineo-seshee-bopape Accessed 31 March 2021.Levy, A. 2019.

4.) Mathibedi, M. 2021. Alexandra plots 489 & 490, land claim. Interview by author. [Transcript]. 20 March.

Johannesburg.

5.) Maude, S, & van der Bijl, C. 2013. History of Llandudno. [O].

Available: http://www.llandudno.org.za/community/ history.html Accessed 20 April 2021.

6.) Ntshidi, E. 2020. ‘New City’: Ramaphosa launches R30bn Mooikloof Mega Residential City Project.

Eyewitness News. [O].

Available: https://ewn.co.za/2020/10/04/new-cityramaphosa-launches-r30bn-mooikloof-mega-residentialcity-project/amp

Accessed 26 March 2021.

7.) Oxford Reference. 2021. Carnivalesque. Oxford University Press. [O].

Available: https://www.oxfordreference.com/ view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095550811 Accessed 24 May 2021.

8.) Postcommodity. 2012. Repellent Fence. Art Matters.

[O].

Available: https://artmattersfoundation.org/texts/ postcommodity Accessed 12 April 2021.

9.) van Aardt, T. 2021, Khoi hold three day ritual celebration at Gamtoos river. HeraldLive. [O].

Available: https://www.heraldlive.co.za/news/2021-0302-khoi-hold-three-day-ritual-celebration-at-gamtoosriver/ Accessed 18 August 2021.

10.) Weizman, E. 2014. Israel: The Architecture of Violence. Aljazeera. [O].

Available: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/ rebel-architecture/2014/9/2/israel-the-architecture-ofviolence Accessed 12 April 2021.

11.) Who owns South Africa? The New Yorker. [O].

Available: https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2019/05/13/who-owns-south-africa Accessed 23 March 2021.

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S-2: Immersion Section, 3D render, collage & sketch overlay, 1:20.

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S-1: Section of Diversion Route, 3D render, collage & sketch overlay, 1:50.

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Tshwanelo Kubayi

WATROPOLIS:

Subverted Narratives of Ritual Disorder.

SITE: Oranjezuicht, along the Camissa streams, Cape Town

Abstract The work explores the social violence surrounding black women in spaces of servitude that organize their social currency within modern and segregated society. Violence against domesticated black women started from the indoctrination of the washerwoman, and was maintained through modern day servants’ quarters, where she as a particular social figure was restricted to always be of service. Through this framework of spatial practice, the work defines architecture as a tool that perpetuates a social classification that subordinates black women.

The research grounds itself within US author Anna Julia Cooper’s ‘triple consciousness’ theory surrounding race, gender and class constructs that render black women invisible through ritual programming (Staton-Taiwo 2004).

The work’s site of interest is the Oranjezicht suburb of Cape Town, along the Camissa streams where the myth of Mami Wata resides. The work proposes a water city that aims to eradicate the narrative of the ‘domesticated’ black woman by proposing architecture that demolishes the social construction of the current Oranjezicht suburb to establish new realities and social relationships.

The proposition begins at the mythical scale of 1:100,000 with a focus on the narrative of Mami Wata, and then moves to the scale of 1:5,000 as an urban design framework, and to the scale of detailing, to focus particularly on the domestic servant as a custodian of Wata.

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R: Washer Confinement, legacy map, collage, 1:5,000.

The work grounds itself in Anna Julia Cooper’s Triple consciousness theory, which was derived as an extrapolation of WEB du Bois’s Double Consciousness Theory, and that articulates how black female identity is viewed through three, rather than two lenses, namely nationhood, race and gender. Cooper explains how politicized race, gender and class constructs render black women invisible and contemptuous through a ritual reprogramming rooted in politicized social currency.

The work unpacks how colonial societies render them as hidden figures, despite the important roles they play even in the societies designed to erase them.

The portfolios is split in two. The first part is an index that sets the groundwork for the second part, which holds the narrative scope of the Major Design Project’s mythological origin story and dystopic world called Watopia, whose deity is Mami Wata, the water spirit that originates from West, Central and Southern Africa.

Through investigations of both cultural and social ritual practices, the work explores how black female identity has been made inseparable from servitude in South Africa.

The research first grounds itself in the way that the author received gendered instructions from her aunt as a child through the uMhonyane rite of passage into womanhood, regarding how to appease an overseeing public gaze. This codified the public realm in an inherently gendered way. Storyboarding was used to give language to that public performance of young womanhood, highlighting the ways that space became an extension of her aunt’s myths and reality simultaneously.

The drawings of this ritual expresses time, memory, and performance.

The study then mapped the required choreographic practices of domestication through the author’s own recent lobola ritual, to better unearth the forms of public performance embedded within it along gender lines, while observing some of its objectifying and domesticating characteristics.

This interest of gendered training toward being

positioned in service of various notions of ‘master’ grounded the primary research in the histories of the washerwomen in the Cape, who were the slave maids when the Cape of Good Hope was established as a new settlement. These washerwomen used the Camissa River to do their laundry work, and while there, they were able to forge strong community and strategies of revolt.

There, washing stations were sanctioned work spaces that also served as meeting places, where the slave washerwomen felt temporarily freed from the constraints of household routines and the direct supervision of their masters. Doing laundry was one of the few domestic tasks that could be done outside of the master’s home, which afforded the washerwomen an unprecedented degree of independence. This, however, was the only typology of public space that was exclusively assigned to black women, and the work highlights this continued association through a conflation of the historical washerwomen wash stations and the modern-day servants’ quarters.

The study gets sited on the washerwomen site of the Camissa River by van Riebeeck Park. The work reintroduces the relationship that the indigenous Camissa people had with that land, as the Camissa River was believed to carry the water spirit Mami Wata, who is said to have sustained the Camissa people’s nomadic lifestyle in harmony and connection with nature. When it was designated as a washing place, it changed their ritual relationship to site, and in the process, banished Mami Wata to a mere fiction.

Through the work, Mami Wata is revived, and along with it, the river’s notions of place. It is through this process of bringing Mami Wata to life that that the author started having very vivid dreams of her in both her water and snake form. In line with a myriad of African mythological tales, the Mami Wata spirit is both nature and figure simultaneously. She is both protective and deadly, and resides in the rivers, wetlands and seas, as the water acts as a gateway to the spiritual realm. As an Nguni mythical character, she is known as umamlambo, or the goddess of rivers, and is representationally

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B-L: Wata Institute_The Portal into the Water Kingdom, narrative perspective, collage & line-drawing, 1:100.

R: Act 1_The Calling, site plan, line-drawing, 1:100.

depicted as Santa Marta Dominadora, who is known as the patron of domestic servants and who is said to have helped relieve them from cruelty and abuse.

In the process of mapping and reckoning with site, the author embodies the role of Mami Wata as a first attempt at forming the world that Mami Wata evokes when she visits.

Mami Wata becomes a pivotal collaborator in the work, and her origin story in Cape Town is first languaged through a method called ‘narrative labour’, through the mediums of pen, paint, marker, water and performance.

‘Narrative labour’ is a process that combines manual labour and narrative. This becomes the method and language of the work, and as a result, the relationship of the author’s body to what is made, as well as the vocabulary surrounding how things get made become important components of how the work’s artifacts are captured and presented.

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The proposition takes shape in the suburb of Oranjezuicht, which is where the Camissa River is located, and tracks Cape Town’s history with water with the inclusion of Mami Wata as an active figure within its patterns of floods and droughts and its susceptibility to imminent future flooding as a result of climate change predictions. The work unfolds the possibility that the flooding will indeed happen and will be orchestrated by Mami Wata as a redemptive act for the servitude class.

The consequence of the flood is unpacked in 3 acts, where the final one births the city of Watropolis as a defense against existing gendered, exclusionary and exclusive social systems of oppression. The city’s spatial laws are articulated as a triptych covenant. In Watropolis, water is the main currency, and domestic workers are its custodians. Watropolis’s Front-of-House is articulated, which are its Fountain Centres, and is where the sacred value of water is restored and its access renegotiated.

The journey to it unfolds as a pilgrimage.

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R-1: Watropolis_The Wata Rites of Passage, ritual catalogue, linedrawing, 1:1 &1:100.

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L-3: Watropolis_Ritual Calling, choreographic drawing, linedrawing, 1:1 & 1:100.

R-3: Watropolis_Wata Temple, plan, cross-section and choreography drawing, line-drawing, 1:1 & 1:100.

References 1.) Camissa :_A tale of NOT SO SWEET waters. 2021.

[O].

Available: https://youtu.be/-GjySEq9nY8 2.) Staton-Taiwo,S.L.2004. The effects of Cooper’s ‘A voice from the South’ on W.E.B Du Bois’s Souls and Black Flame Trilogy. Philosophia Africana, August 7(2);59-80. [O].

Available: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philafri.7.2.0059 Accessed 24 May 2021.

3.) Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: intimate histories of social upheaval. 2019. Manual for general housework.

[O].

Available: https://www.are.na/block/6236624 Accessed 17 July 2021.

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R-2: Watropolis_Passage of Gratitude, plan, cross-section and choreography drawing, line-drawing, 1:1 & 1:100.

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L-2: Watropolis_Ritual Sacrifice, choreographic drawing, linedrawing, 1:1 & 1:100.

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L: Watropolis_ Pilgrimage Ritual, choreographed drawing, line-drawing, 1:1 & 1:100.

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2. deferred or delayed.

000 M2 Missing Ingredients at the Last Supper: Gathering at the Table of Past Selectivity with the Dispossessed of the Cape Flats.

NATALIE harper 000 M1 Eclipse of the Patriarchy. razeenah manack 000 M1 Regulations of Professionalism: The Seductive Logic of Developments. olive olusegun

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Natalie Harper

MISSING INGREDIENTS AT THE LAST SUPPER:

Gathering at the Table of Past Selectivity with the Dispossessed of the Cape Flats.

SITE: District Six and Table Mountain, Cape Town

Abstract Missing Ingredients is framed around the mythology of spatial-cleansing under the violences of apartheid. Through the Population Registration Act (PRA) and Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1950, communities were split apart on the basis of those racial demarcations (de Bruyn, 2007:422). This was done through the “building of apartheid” (Coetzer, 2013. Building Apartheid).

The Cape Dutch house is used as a heterotopia that exposes the micro-scale of the invisible and harsh constructs of macro-segregation in the post-apartheid city of Cape Town. The project proposes A Last Supper; a family reunion that explores and critically reconsiders the intimate home-setting of a racially obscure family.

District Six is conceptualized as the ‘front room’ of a Cape Dutch house heterotopia that flows directly into the dining room where Table Mountain is introduced both geographically and conceptually as the ‘supper’ table, orchestrating a collective relationality between different ‘members’ coming to that table.

The Cape Flats is conceptualized as the ‘kitchen’, a space of making and a space in service, where the sourcing of missing ingredients is found.

The sites reflect on and expose apartheid architecture and its long-term effects of the historical practice of race designations and spatial-cleansing on mythologies of identity and landscape.

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B-L: The Last Supper Table, perspective, line drawing, 1:10,000.

R: Site Plan-Ordered Segregation, plan, line drawing, 1:100 imposed on to 1:10,000.

The research borrows from the author’s mixed-race heritage, as it distinguishes between ‘coloured’ and ‘mixed-race’, where ‘coloured’ was a politically instituted racial category that embodies a complex cultural community that was displaced and conglomerated into designated townships, while ‘mixed-race’ – which is not a political term and does not refer to a distinct community – refers to first-generation children of parents of different races.

The work focuses on exposing the continued effect of apartheid ethnic cleansing on mixed families. The research’s starting point was at articulating the violence of racialized system’s weaponization of cleanliness that establishes a euphemistic framework for overt expressions of geographic racism, such as forced removals.

The apartheid regime’s pseudo-scientific pencil test, categorized people into four racial groups, namely White, Black, Indian and Coloured (which was an umbrella term for all people across generations of mixed-race heritage). As a research endeavour, the original test is altered, which renders racial classification malleable to reveal the folly of trusting such a method to measure complexities of race and identity.

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inquiry through the film titled, Reminisce from the Kitchen, where macro-narratives of the districts are mapped through micro-translations, by enacting apartheid forced removals under the guise of spatial cleansing – coined from the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ – through the ritual of washing dishes. The glove-wearing oppressor performs the process of forced removals through the literal washing of dishes, but an important detail to note is how it is not the dishes that are washed, but the sink that was containing the dishes, making strong commentary surrounding blackness as synonymous with dirt. In all of the video work, the ‘God View’ is used as a way to introduce the gaze of whiteness as a self-appointed God gaze, and to have audiences witness the work through the act of intruding upon intimate and private conditions of space.

The work then explores the logic of the Cape Dutch house & observes the overlap in logic between it and the city of Cape Town’s urban spatial arrangements. The city gets manifested through the house as its heterotopic translation in line with Aldo Rossi’s ‘city-as-home’ notions, and allocates suburbs and racially clustered areas as distinct rooms in this house.

Where the harbour represents the front door and District Six the foyer, the Cape Flats and its wastewater

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B-L: The Whitewashed Black Woman, elevation & plan, film storyboard & photographs, 1:1.

R: Performance Paths to the Last Supper, plan, line drawing, 1:10,000.

plant represents the kitchen sink in the scullery of Cape Town. Table Mountain is translated into the dining room.

The use of the Cape Dutch house typology is significant, as this was not only a manifestation of Afrikaner pride and hierarchy in architectural form, but also a space where master-slave sexual violations resulted in the origins of the ‘coloured’ race.

Building on the mode of the Cape Dutch house as heterotopia, the proposition operates on both the macro- and micro-scale as the work focusses in on tracing the incomplete archives of the black, or Xhosa side of the author’s family that were both spatially and narratively cleansed.

In coloured and mixed-race history, the black lineage is often rendered invisible through modes or archiving and documentation. To revive these histories, the work orchestrates A Last Supper as a defence against forgetting. This supper is a family reunion that orchestrates a dirtying of dishes as it critically reconsiders the intimate home-setting of a racially obscure family. Table Mountain as the supper table, orchestrates a collective relationality between different ‘members’ coming to that table, where some serve, and some are served. As mentioned earlier, the Cape Flats is conceptualized as the scullery kitchen where the sourcing of the missing ingredients surrounding black identity and belonging are found.

The racial demographics of the Cape Flats, which is primarily coloured, was formed in the 1970s through the forced removals of the then more racially diverse District Six, roughly 25kms away from it.

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The work then problematizes the pristine nature of the Cape Dutch house, by unravelling its rather monstrous nature, when the spatial laws of segregation are applied to it. Suddenly, floor slabs hover over roofs, staircases lead to nothing, and the supper becomes an impossible event from the various family members’ vantage points due to the varying levels of obstacles – or lack of obstacles – that each are confronted with. The Frankenstein-like house on the hill presents the reality that some family members might never be able to show up, or might do so only at the end of the dinner, where the only thing left to do is to clean up and wash the dishes – or to turn around and return home. The project pursuit becomes about attempting to make this currently impossible event occur.

The supper’s invitation introduces the Cape Town-ashome heterotopia as a ghostly, wireframe presence, and the author’s grandmother as a hologram. The hologrammed picture is the only picture that exists of her, as it warns that her presence is felt even if not seen.

The work traverses ideological, urban and sectional scales, as well as the intimate – in the effects that architecture and urban design stands to have on individuals traversing the city of Cape Town’s spatial violences.

The work articulates the empirical moves that renders the house monstruous, which informs how the house gets populated with it particular characters. It scripts the event of the supper, while refining the house as a microcosmic stage for urban lived realities. As an added element to the work, a website was produced that orchestrates 3 different experiences on the basis of racial classifications, and attempts to move the viewer toward the supper table.

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L: Cape Town as Cape Dutch House Heterotopia, plan, collage, 1:100 imposed on 1:10,000.

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R: The Heterotopia of the Landscape, perspective and diagram, line drawing, not to scale.

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S: Visible in the Kitchen, Not Yet in the Dining Room, cross-section, line drawing, 1:100 imposed on 1:10,000 (clickable).

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T-R: A Recipe With Missing Ingredients, elevation, line drawing, 1:50.

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3.) Dovey, K. 1999. Framing Places: Mediating power in built form. Chapter one –Power. Pg 8. Routledge; 1st edition.

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2.) de Bruyn, P. 2008. Frommer’s South Africa. Internet Archive, pp.422. [O].

Available: https://archive.org/details/ frommerssouthafr00pipp/page/422/mode/2up Accessed 19 July 2021.

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1.) Coetzer, N. 2013. Building Apartheid: Space, On Architecture and order in imperial Cape Town. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74(2): 256–257.

England: Ashgate publishing.

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References

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Razeenah Manack

ECLIPSE OF THE PATRIARCHY SITE: Auwal Mosque near Signal Hill, Cape Town

Abstract Violence is a social performance that expresses deeply rooted cultural values. It is the act of controlling bodies as a way of engendering political power.

The work focusses on gendered oppression in misogynistic Muslim societies as a form of violence, where they view their women as the ‘Other’. In these societies, it has become culturally appropriate to suppress the needs and identity of Muslim women.

Architecture is the built realization of a society’s ideologies and serves as a tool of representation that physically reinforces the cultural and traditional beliefs of a society. Mosque architecture has done this by designing women out of communal religious spaces from its inception, and through this methodical exclusion, has transformed from sanctuaries to spaces of violence.

Mosques were initially designed in the centre of communities as places of prayer and gathering. The project therefore explores placemaking in the Muslim community of Bo-Kaap, which sits at the foothills of Signal Hill in Cape Town.

The work proposes a bathhouse and observatory that caters to the needs of Muslim women in order to carry out the rituals surrounding prayer and cleanliness, to physically re-present their belonging within Muslim society and places of worship. This proposition serves as a defence mechanism for Muslim women against gendered expectations and exclusions enacted by patriarchal societies.

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The work explores the continued oppression of Muslim women in domestic and religious spaces, and questions the ways in which Muslim communities treat their women as the ‘Other’, leading to their needs and identities being eclipsed by that of their male counterparts.

The work posits that architecture is the built realisation of a society’s ideologies that reinforces its beliefs. In this way, mosque architecture – which has progressively designed women out of communal religious spaces – is complicit in the oppression of its female believers.

The proposition is sited at the Auwal Mosque, which was the first mosque to be built in Cape Town in 1794.

It serves the Muslim community of the Bo-Kaap at the foothills of Signal Hill.

The year’s research inquiry started at an intimate look at the author’s own domestic space, where the women are dominated by their male family members in a choreographic dance of hierarchy that is played out daily at the family dinner table. These social hierarchies manifest daily in the setting of the table, the serving of food, the order of eating and even the ending of the supper.

Through various mediums explored this year – and always with a focus on a younger audience, with an intent to intercept the gendered programming that is conducted on Islamic youth – a design and narrative breakthrough occurs through the use of the comics. The comic as a narrative device focusses in on the primary audience’s gaze, while narratively expanding on the ritual possibilities of the proposition. The comic introduces the character Anisa, who shares a name with the fourth book of the Quran and means ‘women’ in the plural.

Anisa is an architect, who uses her hijab as an invisibility cloak to occupy spaces she is usually not allowed into.

This echoes the author’s daily experiences at the dining room table, where there is a requirement to wear a hijab before being allowed to sit for dinner. Once this

has been done by the women of the family, they are rendered unseen and not spoken to, as they become submissive and compliant.

The inquiry then focusses strictly on gendered practices in the Islamic faith, which includes the ritual of moon sighting; that only men can perform. The work introduces modelling, stop motion and film to tell the tale of the abduction and burial of the moon by aliens.

This scenario was conceptualised as a critique of the absurd notion that Muslim women should be excluded from the moon sighting ritual, as if they somehow pose an unreasonable threat to the practice. This conflation of reality and fictional narrativization continually fixed the work’s gaze on its adolescent audience.

In the comic articulation of the moon sighting theft provocation, Anisa has a vivid dream wherein the moon is indeed stolen and can no longer be sighted. She is woken up by an idea that excites her: that she could technically ‘steal’ the moon by concealing it with an infrastructure that masquerades as it, while it is in fact in her control. And so, with her nifty invisibility hijab cloak, she is able to sneak into the Auwal Mosque to start planning and building.

She is disturbed by a key amenity that the women don’t have there that further designs them out of key religious rituals – the ablution facilities – so she introduces a bathhouse for the Muslim women in her moon simulator, that also happens to be an observatory where only they can now sight the real moon.

Anisa puts the moon simulator’s access staircase in the space that only the women at the mosque are allowed to access, so that the men have no awareness of that access. The structure eclipses the moon for the men, as its orifices are manoeuvred to mimic the lunar cycle.

The proposition serves as a defence for Muslim women against gendered oppression and designs them back into mosque architecture, to rescript their rightful belonging in Muslim society and its sacred rituals.

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Olive Olusegun

REGULATIONS OF PROFESSIONALISM: The Seductive Logic of Developments

SITE: Future Flooded Cape Town CBD, 2050-2053

Abstract Professionalism is an institutionalized form of regulation and exploitation that seduces employees into sacrificing their lives for the enrichment of a company. The work approaches architecture as a curtain that conceals the hidden exploitative nature of professionalism. Concurrently, the ‘impressive’ architecture of professional institutions performs the role of seducing people into aspiring to professionalism.

Emergent architectural developments such as mixed-use office parks and luxury amenities are some of the ways that architecture acts as this seductive curtain. At the ideological scale, these developments are presented as socially and economically beneficial, however, on an intimate scale, it is revealed how these developments further regulate and exploit employees more than truly aiding them.

The project proposes an exaggerated futuristic mixed-use development in the semi-water-submerged Central Business District (CBD) of Cape Town, 2053. This development focuses on the production of hyper-productive employees by providing all the facilities needed to train, use and dispose of them in a machine-like 'building’ (i.e., schools, offices and even graves).

The proposition exposes the hidden violence of professional systems as a whole though satirical exaggeration. It is presented in the form of allegorical drawings that are used as discursive devices between different stakeholders within the system of professionalism.

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The year’s interest grounds itself in professionalism ideals and how its institutionalised forms of regulation seduce its participants into sacrificing their entire lives as employees of bottom-line focussed corporations.

At the early stages of the research, staging, scripting and performance are used to articulate and codify the regulation tactics experienced in schools, universities, and the workplace. Through this, architecture is approached as a curtain that conceals the exploitative nature of professionalism ideals, to induce buy-in through seductive means.

At the ideological scale, these institutions of regulation present as modern, forward-thinking and innovative.

At the urban scale, which is the scale at which the analogy of the curtain is articulated, its cradle-to-grave mixed-use development typologies are packaged as socially, environmentally and economically beneficial and necessary. But, at the intimate scale, its exploitation frameworks become apparent.

The work proposes an exaggerated and initially utopicseeming mixed-use vertical development called Life-Cycle Cities – in a partially flooded 2050 Cape Town – as a dystopic deterrent against the exaggerated directions that our development patterns are heading toward.

This city produces hyper-productive employees and provides them with all the amenities they need to be trained, used and then disposed of, as the work makes explicit the relationship between the colonial project, urban development and the production of labour.

The city is grounded atop a corporate building in the Cape Town city centre, and grows vertically due to its inability to grow horizontally across the flood.

The project satirises mixed-use developments such as Waterfall Estate in Midrand, Gauteng, which only physically manifested in the past decade even though its conceptualisation and planning started shortly after 1994.

The city is narrated through two respective stakeholders.

The first is of the developer design team – selling the ideal city to future inhabitants, and the second is of a future inhabitant in the year 2053, in an iteration of the city, named The City of Hidden Suffering, who reveals the reality of the system. Through this, one is able to negotiate both what is apparent on the surface versus what is hidden within this system of regulation and control.

The city is visually composed through a discursive hand drawing that acts as an incremental world-building device. In it, satirical exaggerations take the form of familiar and/or significant urban and spatial artefacts that are both borrowed and reprogrammed. The drawing occupies the entire length of a bedroom wall, and drawing space was continually added as the design was being further refined.

The city centres around four programmes that act as network components, and props on a stage: Work, Education, Leisure, and Service. Subsidiary programmes are networked around these cores, and they inform the narrative structure.

The city’s buildings are extracted from the flooded landscape, such as the V&A waterfront, Bishops Diocesan college, and the University of Cape Town.

These are chosen for their current roles within the system of professionalism, such as Bishops Diocesan college that currently acts as a feeder school for UCT. Here, a sectional axonometric unfolds both the seen and unseen, to reveal the details of the schooling system that we consider valuable in a capitalist society.

A palette of characters populates the drawing as actors.

The top achieving matric students have a recognizable human form, exaggerated in scale to advertise the prestige of a school (and schooling system). When looking at the basement of the school, one is able to observe the satirical manipulation of those actors, as the top achieving students are in fact parrots that have graduated to human costumes by the end of their school career.

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As the city’s counterweights due to its extreme verticality, the city proposes that service staff live densely packed within large carriers that hang beneath the ground planes of the city’s different quarters. This is presented by the developers as an even greater feat of hyper-densification than what has already been achieved through townships and informal settlements.

In an end-stage of life-cycle city, the Ferris Wheel of Death is proposed as a retirement home that carries the elderly directly to their grave, even if prematurely.

It provides commentary on the commercialism of old-age, and highlights how pension funds are offered as incentives to lure young people into corporate life, promising them a future of stability and care.

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A hand-drawing was produced at mid-year as a culmination of the year’s thinking and research explorations. At first only illustrative, this drawing, its type and methods were later decoded to derive the language of the thinking and outcomes of the proposition. Through this process, a gravity index was derived to unpack how components were located as either grounded, tethered, or free-floating. This ‘factory drawing’ helped develop the narrative, site the proposal and its parts, and detail the satirical characteristics of the proposition for its context and intended audience(s).

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T-03: Beyond the Terra Nullius Unit Leader: Tuliza Sindi Unit Assistants: Tshwanelo Kubayi & Miliswa Ndziba

“It is always the same story.

Barren land. Undeveloped land. Terra nullius.

Barbaric, uncivilized inhabitants. Backward peoples. Jaahil log.

The colonial drive to occupy. The colonial drive to expel.

The colonial need for self-aggrandizement and dishonest justifications.

The myth of the greater god. The myth of knowing better.

La mission civilisatrice. ‘National development’.

It is always exactly the same story” (Anwar, 2021).

Unit 19 defines architecture as the production of substitute grounds/ground conditions that, in the context of settler-colonial and apartheid states such as South Africa, operate as negating grounds. These grounds enable sustained practices of displacement (and dispossession1), violations and erasures of an array of the origin ground’s tethered meanings (and their embedded futures).

Unsettling Ground works to unravel and disentangle the ongoing settler-colonial legacy of the captured grounds that the Architectural profession inscribes, sustaining its captivity. The first way that the studio does this is by retiring approaches to ‘land’ – which delimit 1 The word dispossession means to “deprive (someone) of land, property, or other possessions” (dispossession, 2021). It is used tentatively in the framing text as it implies that those who have been dispossessed held the same marketized relationship to land, and on the basis of this shared notion of ownership was the land passed from one hand to another. This negating misnomer suffocates the other notions of meaning that those who have been separated from land might have held, making the extent of loss inaccurately recorded as a loss of property only – or a possessable thing – while that loss might have included loss of language, of medicinal and food wisdoms, of sacred ground, and so on, all which are not necessarily perceived as possessions. To frame it as dispossession is to negate other knowledge systems and indigenous ontologies.

our spatial imaginings within the autopoietic confines of colonial economic conceptions – and rather, adopting approaches to ‘grounds’, or, the earth’s surface – and the first architectural plane – absent of its inscribed socio-economic and/or socio-political conceptions.

While the word ‘ground’ is defined as a natural condition (ground, 2021), ‘land’ is defined as an applied economic conception of the ground, embodying in its meaning notions of ownership, territory and marketized characterizations of productivity (land, 2021). The Unit approaches these and other such conceptions of the ground as ‘substitute grounds’, and has students suspend those modi operandi, to conjure old and new ground philosophies and their accompanying socio-spatial imaginaries.

The Urdu term Jaahil log in the epigraph means ‘ignorant people’ as its direct translation. Its etymology outlines its meaning as ‘barbaric’ or ‘un-civilized’ metaphorically, and ‘illiterate’ literally (jaahil, 2021). It is, in part, on the basis of this misdiagnosed illiteracy by European colonial settlers that psychologist Frantz Fanon claimed that separate notions of the Human were founded upon, i.e., the literate and superior humanitas2, and the 2 Humanitas

is a term that signifies an exceptional kind of humanity

UNSETTLING GROUND 2022 / 2021

UNSETTLING GROUND 2022

wretched anthropos3 (Mignolo, 2015). This perception of the native as illiterate and barbaric was fundamental to the conception of ground-as-land through ideologies of improvement and development by founder of the British modern political economy, William Petty, who conflated the value of land (measured on the basis of their productive capacity in that political economy) with the value of people, to create what Brenna Bhandar (2020) refers to as “‘racial regimes of ownership’” (Bhandar, 2020). These new regimes tied socialization, the practice of politics and definitions of the Human to the very definitions of the ground, where any use of property that did not bare the hallmarks of individual ownership was deemed inferior, less valuable, and available for appropriation as a terra nullius4 (Bhandar, 2020).

Accessed 17 August 2021.

In 2022, the Unit will delve into the empty land myth (or what is known in South Africa as the second Hamite myth) on a site of past and present contestation between the Xhosa and the British, namely the Sunshine Coast of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. As cartographers, archaeologists and conjurers, students will propose revised possibilities for this landscape through the Unit’s primary methods and mediums of excavation, cartography, cataloguing, storytelling, and modelling/ simulation. The Unit will conduct its research across four scales at different stages of the design research process and students will be required to produce work of a high resolution through skilled technification tools that include assembly drawings, phasing diagrams, and detailed spatial simulations.

6.) Dictionary.cambridge.org. 2021. ground. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/ground Accessed 6 August 2021.

References 1.) Anwar, F., 2021. The Funambulist Correspondents 13 /// Land Theft as Colonial Legacy in Pakistan. [online] THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/thefunambulist-correspondents-13-land-theft-as-coloniallegacy-in-pakistan Accessed 10 August 2021.

2.) Bhandar, B., 2020. Lost property: the continuing violence of improvement - Architectural Review. [online] Architectural Review.

Available at: https://www.architectural-review.com/ essays/lost-property-the-continuing-violence-ofimprovement capable of engaging in both empirical and transcendental knowledge production (Sakai, 2010:455). This referred to Europeans only as they were seen to be the only ones with this capacity.

3 Anthropos is a term reserved for a lesser kind of humanity who participate only in empirical knowledge-production, i.e., although they are able to produce knowledge, they were deemed incapable of reflecting upon and criticizing their modus operandi (Sakai, 2010:455).

4 Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land” (Terra nullius – Wikipedia, 2021). Note the use of the word ‘land’ in the translation of the expression.

3.) Camissamuseum.co.za. unknown. Terra Nullius - The Lie about an Empty Land - Camissa Museum. [O].

Available at: https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php/ orientation/our-foundation-people-roots/terra-nulliusthe-lie-about-an-empty-land Accessed 18 August 2021.

4.) Chimurenga Chronic, 2018. The Idea of a Borderless World. pp.4-5.

5.) Dictionary.cambridge.org. 2021. dispossession. [O].

Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/dispossession Accessed 6 August 2021.

7.) Dictionary.cambridge.org. 2021. land. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/land Accessed 6 August 2021.

8.) Dictionary.cambridge.org. 2021. unsettling. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/unsettling Accessed 6 August 2021.

9.) Mignolo, W., 2015. Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?. In: K. McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter on Being Human as Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp.106-123.

10.) Sahistory.org.za. unknown. The Empty Land Myth | South African History Online. [O].

Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/ empty-land-myth Accessed 18 August 2021.

11.) Sakai, N., 2010. Theory and Asian humanity: on the question of humanitas and anthropos. In: Postcolonial Studies, 13th ed. London: Routledge, p.455.

12.) Rekhta.org.2021.jaahil. [O].

Available at: https://www.rekhta.org/urdudictionary?key word=jaahil&reftype=rweb Accessed 6 August 2021.

13.) En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Terra nullius - Wikipedia. [O].

Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_ nullius Accessed 17 August 2021.

Thank you to the GSA Operations Team for being so warm, accessible, flexible and patient.

Thank you to Dr. Mark Raymond for greeting your new role with a warm, generous and grounding spirit.

Thank you to Dr. Finzi Saidi for your continued mentorship, modelling, explaining, patience and reassurtion that we do indeed belong. Thank you for still being here.

Thank you to our courageous class of 2021, who so boldly underwent the daunting process of showing up as themselves in their work. Thank you to: • Patricia Bandora (M1) • Veronicah Maluleke (M1) • Razeenah Manack (M1) • Liso Mdiya (M1) • Thembeka Mpolweni (M1) • Olive Olusegun (M1) • Natalie Harper (M2) • Tshwanelo Kubayi (M2) • Brighton Matambo (M2) • Tuki Mathibedi (M2) • Thandeka Mnguni (M2) • Miliswa Ndziba (M2) • Shiloh Masego Rakumakwe (M2) • Dimpho Selepe (M2) • Ntombizethu Shube (M2) Thank you to the 2021 team of tutors, that include: • Muhammad Dawjee as 2-year Unit Tutor • Lynette Breed as Unit Assistant You have both set impossible standards, and indeed made the impossible possible.

Thank you to all of our talented and insightful contributors in the form of examiners, advisors and critics. In no particular order, thank you to: • Anesu Chigariro • Arinjoy Sen • Jabu Makhubo • Kgaugelo Lekalakala • Sarah Treherne • Sabelo Mcinziba • Ngillan Faal • Naadira Patel • Mxolisi Makhubo • Tshepo Ngwenya

• • • • • •

Natache Iilonga Leopold Lambert Dr. Mark Raymond Patti Anahory Nabeel Essa Ilze Wolff

Thank you to all of our impressive alumni who so graciously engaged our students on their interests, processes, methods and outputs: • Lynette Breed • Sarah Treherne • Gloria Pavita • Zolani Gomba • Jana Cloete Thank you to Sabelo Mcinziba for our in-depth historical introductions to the Cape and for tailoring our tour of Cape Town in ways that left us with only the responsibility to reckon with its ongoing violences. Thank you also, for seeing us and the Unit 19 project as more than just a project.

Thank you for seeing it with and through your heart, and for offering yours in return.

Thank you to Roving Bantu Kitchen for providing the incredible delicacies at our much-needed Collective Exhale gathering. Thank you Veronicah for the vibes you set through your amazing playlist. Thank you Razeenah for bringing more than you were asked to bring, and ever so generously. Thank you Muhammad for your wonderful organizational skills. Thank you Olive for your words that so deeply moved us. Thank you to everyone for our most thoughtful gifts. Thank you Sabelo and Tuki for handling the continued confrontation with such levelheadedness.

Some final and personal thank yous from Tuliza: • “Thank you, Muhammad Dawjee” is a full sentence. It embodies the full extent of thanks that my words still fail to capture. In every way, your entire being is worthy of deep honour and praise. May you see the gold you turn things into. May you believe that that gold indeed comes from you.

• Lynette Breed, thank you for showing up as the profound force that we needed. There is a Unit before and a Unit after your presence. You have changed our trajectory, and your form of showing up has set precedents that we will carry with us to greater heights.

Your pioneering spirit lives on with us.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / 2021

We’d like first to extend our warmest thank you to the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) for your financial and institutional support.

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Acknowledgements