The Port of Evidence

Patricia Bandora

MArch 2022

Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Jiaxin Yan Gong
Unit Assistant: Ruth Manda
Unit Assistant: Thandeka Mnguni

UNIT 14
Rogue Roots: Magic of Port and Passage

Awards
Unit 14 Prize
Women in Architecture Prize
Distinction

The Port of Evidence: Reconstructing the Missing Black Box of the Rwandan Genocide investigates the Rwandan Genocide to reveal architecture’s complicity, the impact of numerous events, and its ability to surface other truths of the past and future in the form of a Port of Evidence. The work takes reference from Taryn Simon’s work, A Living Man Declared Dead, to propose an isoko (market); consisting of a taxi park, an internet café, a market, and a gumtree as key non-institutional architectures of information income and dissemination. The Port of Evidence is situated at the site of the plane crash in which President Habyarimana was killed. The site is constructed in place of the plane’s black boxes that were never found, thus resurfacing other histories. The significance of this body of work lies in the framing of a ‘port’, as a figurative written ‘archive’ that exists in one place creating and preserving certain histories that were shaped by the arrival of colonists in search of and advocating an ideal to conquer and divide the African people. This work is produced through investigative methods of data collection, analysis and translation using architectural languages to spatialise its long-lasting impact.

Keywords:
Genocide, Dissemination, Information, Port, Evidence, Rwanda, Oral Archive