The HIAA department has decided, out of an abundance of caution, and to protect against seasonal flu, colds and COVID-19, we will continue to require masks for all indoor lectures and gatherings during Spring 2022.
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Mpho Matsipa, University of the Witwatersrand & Harvard Graduate School of Design
Black people are often forced to wait. Waiting may result in being rendered “unmappable,” a people or people who have no stable spatial-temporal references, and for whom the exact timing of ‘progress’ from one temporal location to the next is largely unknown.
While waiting is intrinsic to the human condition, waiting nevertheless has a wide range of modalities that range from hope, romantic longing, and gratifying, to frustration and despair – and the apocalyptic. The idea of Africa in the west, as argued by Toni Morrison, is an idea that is “fraught with the assumptions of a complex intimacy coupled with an acknowledgement of unmediated estrangement” The literary tropes of Africa are exact replicas of perceptions of foreignness. This conundrum of the dispossession of native peoples constitutes an exile within one’s home - that not only enables the projection of colonial fantasies of Africa, as a void, as timeless as ripe for intervention or extraction , but also the dystopian character of imperialism as catastrophe for the majority world.
This presentation argues that the future is inflected with race, emerges from a milieu that is gendered, colonized , displaced, hunted. By reflecting on the outputs of various architects and artists in Africa and the global diaspora, it argues that thinking creatively through Black spatialities and Black time, bridges the space between a harrowing past and a potentially redemptive future.
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Mpho Matsipa is a Loeb Fellow (Harvard GSD), educator, researcher and curator based at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley and teaches Advanced Studio, History and Theory of Planning and Architecture, in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is a researcher at WiSER and co-investigator on an Andrew Mellon research grant on Mobilities, Temporalities and African Future Politics, which is housed by the African Center for Society and Migration Studies. She has written critical essays on art and architecture and curated several exhibitions and discursive platforms, including co-curating the South Africa Pavilion at the 11th and a collaborative art installation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibitions, Venice Biennale (2008; 2021); chief curator of African Mobilities at the Architecture Museum, Pinakothek der Modern in Munich (2018); and Studio-X Johannesburg, in South Africa (2014-2016).