Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
KWACHEKEKA!
Terraforms of Black
Temporal border performance drawing. Mlambo, S. Unit 18. 2021.
Simphiwe Mlambo
BArch Hons 2021Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Naadira Patel
Unit Leader: Sarah de Villiers
Unit Assistant: Nothando Lunga
UNIT 18︎︎︎
Hyperreal Prototypes: Supersurfaces
Project Website
Click Here
The project is a counter map of prototypes (terraform apparatus) that addresses spatial themes of territory and identity. It examines how the term Black is weaponised by coloniality as a device to render the surface of anything it is applied to as a super surface of inherited states and structures of violence and anxiety, that dispossesses the African body of its agency. The work situates itself in the juxtaposing timelines of The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, and the looting events of July 2021, in South Africa.
The work begins with in-depth research of memorial sites of the Black, namely the body of the black female and the apartheid-era Population Registration Act of 1950 to uncover the visibly invisible systems and surfaces that hold bonds of trauma and violence, understanding performance and language as second skins of space, which are subjugated to forms of continued resistance and manipulation across time, evidencing the role the construct of Black plays in coopting the bodies and environments which they occupy within the dichotomy of colonial and contemporary South Africa.
This, along with tracing the narrative of the looting event of July 2021, a movement is presented that will be used as a portal, that forms the stage for my major design project: to challenge the status quo of the institutions of colonial power (The Berlin Conference) to temporarily rupture the perpetual hold on the agency of African territories and bodies to disrupt the lens of the archive, and to speculate new methodologies of reading and drawing African territories, by shifting and reimagining current methodologies of language, mapping, and performance.
The prototype will draw on narrative and language where Sharpe argues that “blackness is, anagrammatically. That is, we can see the moments when blackness opens up into the anagrammatical in the literal sense as when ‘a word, phrase, or name is formed by rearranging the letters of another”( Sharpe 2018: 144) and use the sense as prompts for recollection, through material studies as a set of experiments transposed into physical methods of performance.
The work begins with in-depth research of memorial sites of the Black, namely the body of the black female and the apartheid-era Population Registration Act of 1950 to uncover the visibly invisible systems and surfaces that hold bonds of trauma and violence, understanding performance and language as second skins of space, which are subjugated to forms of continued resistance and manipulation across time, evidencing the role the construct of Black plays in coopting the bodies and environments which they occupy within the dichotomy of colonial and contemporary South Africa.
This, along with tracing the narrative of the looting event of July 2021, a movement is presented that will be used as a portal, that forms the stage for my major design project: to challenge the status quo of the institutions of colonial power (The Berlin Conference) to temporarily rupture the perpetual hold on the agency of African territories and bodies to disrupt the lens of the archive, and to speculate new methodologies of reading and drawing African territories, by shifting and reimagining current methodologies of language, mapping, and performance.
The prototype will draw on narrative and language where Sharpe argues that “blackness is, anagrammatically. That is, we can see the moments when blackness opens up into the anagrammatical in the literal sense as when ‘a word, phrase, or name is formed by rearranging the letters of another”( Sharpe 2018: 144) and use the sense as prompts for recollection, through material studies as a set of experiments transposed into physical methods of performance.
Keywords:
Earthquake, narrative, displacement, Renaming, labour, performance, etymology, prototype, memory, rupture, gaze, black, body, land, ritual
Earthquake, narrative, displacement, Renaming, labour, performance, etymology, prototype, memory, rupture, gaze, black, body, land, ritual
Copyright © 2022 Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. All Rights Reserved.