Johannesburg, South Africa + London, UK

In response to the selected research and curatorial brief set by SOAS University of London ‘Building Africa: An African State Architecture Exhibition’, Matri-Archi(tecture) prepositions an exhibition in Johannesburg, South Africa particularly interested in the Constitutional Court and Union Buildings. The exhibition ‘Building Africa: the State of Things!1’ asks what it means to restore, preserve, foreground, call upon, remember and project former and future conditions of socio-political identity through the architecture of buildings that were once central figures in the political agenda of South Africa. The exhibition aims to foreground the tensions and paradoxes that these buildings represent in their politically charged conceptions, responses, lives and presences; identified and highlighted by the SOAS research. The State of Things! encourages the visitor to creatively participate in reading the stories of these contested sites through an intimate spatial experience. Matri-Archi(tecture) seeks to make legible many overlooked stories that are often relegated to myth, folk and tale. We recognise these stories in the research—often ungraspable due to their lack of form—and see this as a prompt for articulating the socio-political implications of these buildings, through the public sentiment of their spatial forms. We do this through designing a collection of carefully crafted models that foreground particular moments in these buildings and their surrounds, asking the audience to experience, question and challenge scenes suggested in the research. Further, we will layer notions of non-linear time onto these models, designing moments from the past, the future and the turbulent present. We prompt the audience to think through semi-fictional scenes.We choreograph scenes using Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation2 as a methodological framework for engaging the audience and making the models, using the central questions prepositioned in the research as a means of prompting an engagement to construct narratives whilst learning. These scenes are designed in response to the research, prompting the audience to question, interpret and construct their own narratives of these buildings whilst learning about the carefully researched content. By communicating through models, we aim to address a wide audience in South Africa, beyond academic and archival text. We ask anyone who visits this exhibition—what is the state of these buildings, what is the state of the politics around them, what is the state of your experience of them; ultimately...what is the state of things? We ask anyone who visits this exhibition—what is the state of these buildings, what is the state of the politics around them, what is the state of your experience of them; ultimately...what is the state of things? We encourage visitors to touch the models, opening up to fantasy and criticality. We encourage visitors to write their down on the art piece, eventually layering into a manifestation of contemporary views of the state of things.