Ellipses Issue [4] Architectures of the South: Bruising, Wounding, Healing, Remembering, Returning, and Repairing

Issue Editorial

Editorial Written by Issue Iv Editors: Huda tayob and catalina Mejía moreno

Architectures of the South questions what is at stake for architecture and spatial practice to contend with the south as an embodied site of knowledge and power [1]. To critically and ethically engage with the south as temporal, geographic and epistemic terrain requires questioning practices, methodologies, forms of engagement and means of representations. It also necessitates a constant awareness of the relational and ‘radical instability of the meaning, location and history’ [2] of the south as a term and location. Framed by the long-standing histories and practices of violence witnessed by the southern geographies of our home countries - Colombia and South Africa - we invited contributors to respond to colonial and neo-colonial violences alongside practices of care and repair. In this issue, we ask how a return to thinking with bruising, wounding, remembering, returning and repairing, might enable a drawing out of relational, deep and long histories of displacement, racialised dispossession and extractive violences; while at the same time foregrounding the necessity of work that centres reparative practices as a move to imagining liveable lives.

‍Inviting contributions on Architectures to a journal of creative research is a provocation to move beyond our own disciplinary structures, and to maintain an insistence on the value of creative practices despite enduring violence. In many ways, this builds on concerns raised in earlier Ellipses [...] journal issues around embodied, southern and situated creative research. We understand architecture, here, as deeply embedded within forms of coloniality and racial capitalism, in a context where indigenous and colonised populations are rendered as ‘outside history’ [3]. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui reminds us in the context of the Americas, while modernity is associated with extractive violence, it is also an arena of resistance, conflict and the development of new projects for other ways of living [4]. In this issue, architecture is material and metaphor, sited and speculative, tangible and intangible, entangled with coloniality while containing the seeds for imagining alternative worlds.

‍The collection of nine creative projects made in response to the open call draw in a wide range of geographies, methods and practices around key concerns. Kitchen Stories by Refiloe Lepere and Nkululeko Selulu is an audio-visual offering which draws out “sigh, sound, song and silence” as an attention to the gestural sounds of Black female labour and hidden trauma and anxieties in Johannesburg across a series of kitchen sites. Disremembered Ruptures/ Rupturas Desmembradas by Margarida Waco, is similarly attuned to silenced histories, people and places, and adopts creative writing as a means to contend with the “spatial toolboxes of violence and trauma” and build an “errant archive” of guerilla women’s experiences in the Angolan civil war. Fleshworks: ‘Consent not to be a single being’ by Camilla Rondot and Antonio di Campli, takes us to Borgo Mezzanone in southern Italy, a site of opacity inhabited by African migrant labourers. In these works, film and narrative are the means to surface the spatial significance of overlooked sites and territories.

‍Narrative and erased stories about racialised tidal pools in the Cape Peninsula resurface in Tidal Pools as Containers of Care by Aaniyah Martin, who shares collectively woven hydro-rugs from plastic waste gathered during ocean clean-ups as a method and practice of actively cleaning and caring for human and more than human life. With Restaging Temporalities: Monsoon Stories from the Kampung, River and Tower by dll. Collective, Jessica Hindradjaja and Hamzah Al Asadulloh, we are plunged into the temporalities of everyday lives and recurrent violence of flooding where story-telling is a means to explore the spatial power dynamics which shape tangible realities across Jakarta. Staying with watery methods, in Ruins of the South Atlantic: Espírito Santo, Brazil by Gabriela Leandro Pereira, Mariana Leandro Pereira we journey through four temporal and spatial acts, overlaid family histories, urban contestations, sustained joy and unimaginable oceanic lives. They remind us that the violence which inaugurates the afro-atlantic diaspora, is always met with gestures of rebuilding life as “de-capture, disobedience and refusal.” In these works, water is a witness and medium, of overlapping violence, joy and care.

‍In further practices of returning to colonial and state archives, Arabsat-1A by Jumanah Abbas, speaks to the celestial body of the satellite as site of “hope and desire for collective unity” and of the “deterritorialisation of earth boundaries”, and yet as entangled with histories of colonialism, racial violence, and uncertain precarity. Revisiting The Mabarebare Archive As Web Platform by George Tebogo Mahashe is a reflection on the possibilities of building a digital archive around the quest for the mythical Modjadji, famed as the Rain Queen of Balobedu. Mineral Maladies: Anatomical Pathologies of the Black Lithosphere by Kaelo Molefe excavates Johannesburg’s mining history, and the pathologies that entangle biological bodies of racialised labourers and environmental and geological degradation. These works offer insights into excavations and alternative engagements with inherited repositories of knowledge that actively point to the possibilities of archival futures.

‍This issue of Ellipses [...] is part of a series of projects from the past three years, which span from private and public conversations, conference panels, an online residency with Tropical Papers, and a Quiet Conversation series [5]. We have included four excerpts of Quiet Conversations to this Issue of Ellipses [...] to further the questioning of Architecture of the South that can be read through this Issue. These conversations supplement and extend questions asked within this issue, and speak to additional ways of sharing and building collective methodologies for creative research. The four excerpts of ‘quiet conversations’ present intimate conversation in which invited artists, architects, researchers and thinkers, Jumoke Sanwo, Felipe Arturo, Marcelo Ferraz, and Zara Julius share their work as a means to think through relational histories and practices.

Collectively, in this issue, the violence of bruising and wounding of people, homes, land, oceans, rivers, skies and stories is countered by deliberate and caring acts of returning and remembering. In different ways, the authors offer insights from their particular southern locations, actively surfacing overlooked stories, histories, sites and geographies [6]. Doing so, as Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us in her fictional short story ‘Sur’, opens a myriad of site-specific ways of engaging and responding collectively to the multiple worlds we inhabit [7]. If representations of the south have historically centred violence, creative methods are adopted here as a means to work against a repetition of this violence, to centre repair, and to think and work beyond the loss and absence of worlds. As Françoise Vergès reminds us, ‘we need to dare to dream of a peaceful life. Peaceful, here, does not mean pacification or appeasing, but a politics and a practice of solidarity, love and self-defense.’ [8] The works gathered and shared in this issue speak to material, visual, sonic and textual practices across southern territories. They draw together entangled relationships of bodies, the built environment and wider ecologies, alongside sites, spaces and acts of solidarity and care. They question how we might collectively share and build methodologies as part of a larger ethical mandate for opening up other ways of knowing and doing [9]. This is a gathering of voices which points towards coordinates, positions and approaches to hold and work through entangled, difficult, but also affective worlds full of possibility.

Footnotes:
1. Ananya Roy, 2014. ‘Worlding the South: Toward a post-colonial Urban Theory’ in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South (ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield) London: Routledge.
2. Ibid, p.16
3. Brennar Bhandar, 2018. Colonial Lives of Property. Durham: Duke University Press.
4. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: on decolonising practices and discourses. Cambridge: Polity Press.
5. This conversation series is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and The Space for Creative Black Imagination. It was developed in conversation with Raél Jero Salley at The Space for Creative Black Imagination, based at MICA in Baltimore, and James MacDonald.
6. Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon (eds.) 2021. Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
7. Ursula K. Le Guin (1982) ‘Sur.’ The New Yorker, pp.38-39.
8. Françoise Vergès, 2022. A Feminist Theory of Violence, London: Pluto Press, p. 102.
9. Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2014. ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics’ States of Black Studies, 44 (2): 81 - 97.
*The June 2022 author’s writing workshop was organised with support from the University of Manchester, SEED Research Recovery Fund.

Issue Editorial

Editorial Written by Issue Iv Editors: Huda tayob and catalina Mejía moreno

Dismembered Ruptures | Rupturas Desmembradas

Politics of Visibility and Memorialization

Margarida Waco

Fleshworks

Opacity is noise in rural spaces

Antonio di Campli

Camilla Rondot

Kherofo

Revisiting the MaBareBare archive as web platform

George Mahashe

Kitchen Stories

Sounds, sights, and stories from kitchens

Nkululeko Ezra Selulu

Refiloe Lepere

Mineral Maladies

Anatomical Pathologies of The Black Lithosphere

Kaelo Molefe

Quiet Conversations: August 7-18, 2023

Russel Hlongwane speaks to the ‘Black interior’ as a practice of negotiating comfort and home in post-Apartheid suburban South Africa.

Russel Hlongwane

Huda Tayob

Quiet Conversations: December 13, 2021

Jumoke Sanwo speaks to the mirror as entangled with the trans-atlantic slave trade, and her work as curator of Dúna Dúrà - A Portal of Reimagination.

Jumoke Sanwo

Catalina Mejía Moreno

Huda Tayob

Quiet Conversations: January 21, 2022

Felipe Arturo shares an Iraca palm fan, as a form of technology that exists within and outside of colonial and neo-colonial economies, material and embodied practices.

Felipe Arturo

Catalina Mejía Moreno

Huda Tayob

Quiet Conversations: July 19, 2023

Sibonelo Gumede speaks to the temporalities and cartographies of Black sonic geographies in Southern Africa and beyond.

Sibonelo Gumede

Huda Tayob

Quiet Conversations: June 21, 2022

Marcelo Ferraz shares the throne of Òsùmàrè as an entry point into a wider conversation around his immersive experience of designing with the Terreiro de Òsùmàrè, in Salvador, Bahía.

Marcelo Ferraz

Catalina Mejía Moreno

Huda Tayob

Quiet Conversations: September 9, 2022

Zara Julius speaks to the entangled geographies and soundscapes of the machete as an object that speaks to entangled layers of labour, oppression, violence, resistance and liberation.

Zara Julius

Catalina Mejía Moreno

Huda Tayob

Restaging Temporalities

Monsoon Stories from the Kampung, River, and Tower

Hamzah Al Asadulloh

Jessica Hindradjaja

Ruins of the South Atlantic | Ruínas do Atlântico Sul

(EN) An essay on the material history of colonial violence and the life-prolonging insubmissive gestures in cities of Espírito Santo, Brazil | (PT) Um ensaio sobre a história material da violência colonial e os gestos insubmissos de prolongamento da vida em cidades do Espírito Santo, Brasil

Gabriela Leandro Pereira

Mariana Leandro Pereira

Maria Bernadete Morosini

Tidal Pools as Containers of Care

False Bay South Africa

Aaniyah Martin

Vertical Frontiers

The many promises behind the launching of the first Arab Satellite

Jumanah Abbas

Catalina Mejia Moreno

Huda Tayob

Tamara Tesoriero

Indonesia

Jakarta

Italy

Spatial Negotiations

Urban Resilience

Trans-corporeality

Racial Capitalism

Brazil

Material History

Colonialism

Ruin

Ditaola

Modjadji

Matsharara

Pan-Arabism

Outer Space

Satellite

Women's Work

Story Circles

Radical Spaces

Black Feminism

Glitch

Opacity

Coexistence

Rurality

Care

Decoloniality

Water

Counter-Memory

Militarized Landscapes

Angola

Mining

Migration

South Africa

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Tamara Tesoriero

Catalina Mejia Moreno

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Dismembered Ruptures | Rupturas Desmembradas

Fleshworks

Kherofo

Kitchen Stories

Mineral Maladies

Quiet Conversations: August 7-18, 2023

Quiet Conversations: December 13, 2021

Quiet Conversations: January 21, 2022

Quiet Conversations: July 19, 2023

Quiet Conversations: June 21, 2022

Quiet Conversations: September 9, 2022

Restaging Temporalities

Ruins of the South Atlantic | Ruínas do Atlântico Sul

Tidal Pools as Containers of Care

Vertical Frontiers