Architecture is a condensation and an overlaying of times, stories, field notes, excerpts, archaeologies and forensic samplings. This reflection on atmospheric violence weaves and traces together excerpts and discursive evidence of the inextricable connections between geographies, history, forces of labour, race and class struggles, capitalism, toxicity and climate change.
About the artist
Sumayya Vally is the Founder and Principal of the interdisciplinary research and architecture studio, Counterspace. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Vally is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1. Ingesting Architectures was presented in 2020 as part of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a General Ecology project event at Serpentine, London.
