In a world shattered by boundaries, communal and structural violences, Mpho Matsipa and Thomas Aquilina use insights from literature and linguistic slippage to find commonality between diasporic communities and define new ways of belonging. In the conversation below, they expound on the triangulations they seek, between site, sight and citation.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Polyglot".

SHUMI BOSE/KOOZ Thank you for joining me, Mpho and Thomas. Today, I’m thinking of your mutual experiments with glossaries and words. You both recently shared that you have been comparing terminologies, texts and translations; can you expand on that?

MPHO MATSIPAWhen Thomas and I were appointed as co-directors of Spatial Justice [ed. within the Bartlett’s new Just Environments Cluster] we decided to explore what possible connections there could be between our own positionalities — between London, Kingston, and Johannesburg.

KOOZ Was that set of locations something that you configured, or was it given to you?

THOMAS AQUILINAThe idea of triangulations really came up through thinking about what it is that connects us. We are based in London and I grew up here too, but together we’re trying to think about London through its interconnected geographies and deep diasporas — and to see this city through other cities. For me, I’m developing new work about downtown Kingston in Jamaica. This is partially an exploration of my own heritage , but also the colonial afterlives of Kingston connect and circulate with many shared, global narratives.

MMThe transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and our shared entanglements with British imperialism is undeniable. We wanted to think about the possibilities about contemporary connections between modes of designing and writing concurrently.

I don't think I can ever be a Londoner; I can only ever experience it as a South African, an outsider. What does it mean to be African, to bring African worldviews or South African sensibilities to a city like London — which itself misrecognises its own Imperial histories? I have episodes of hallucination, double or triple vision, daily.

Our triangulation fosters this idea of thinking across multiple locations simultaneously. We're thinking about ‘site’ as in, what is a site and what does it mean to think about site, especially from a diasporic lens. We’re also thinking about ‘sight’ — in terms of certain regimes of visuality as the dominant ways through which we come to know locations, despite other ways of sensing space.

Finally, the third ‘cite’ is a decolonial positioning, thinking about citation and how one draws on different bodies of knowledge, and what constitutes spatial knowledge in the place where we are. In other words, we're thinking about the constitution of sites in multiple registers, working through this question of triangulation and what it means to “think London” centring Blackness.

TAThe focus on Site, Sight and Cite is to give emphasis to what we’re provisionally calling ‘Dark Triangulations’. We are thinking about these terms as ways of folding and unfolding places. Sites, not as self-evident — always emergent, migrating. So as Mpho said, we are not only thinking about site as a plot or as a territory, but also, what are the sight lines? Who draws those lines? Who is present and who's absent in these spaces? Who are we citing? We are currently reading together two texts side-by-side as a way to frame some of these approaches... In my case, I’ve brought The Lonely Londoners (1956) by Samuel Selvon, and Mpho’s reference is Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams (1946).

MM … We select excerpts from each text that we share with each other, which become the basis for conversation — engaging between London, Kingston and Johannesburg through these literary works, rooted in place.

KOOZ That practice of citation is so interesting; it clearly parallels this notion of being freighted with multiple layers of language and accumulation — partly, in our shared colonial diaspora, as products of trade lines, of economy and capital.

TAAn interesting thing about these two books is actually the biography of the two writers; who become our interlocutors in a way. Sam Selvon was born in 1923 in Trinidad. Four years before that, Peter Abrahams was born in Johannesburg. These two seminal texts were written ten years apart. Mine Boy in 1946, is set in post-war South Africa in the lead-up to apartheid, the novel explores the stereotypes and institutions that discriminate against working-class Black Africans. The Lonely Londoners, a book very much about race and masculinity in London during the Windrush era, from 1956 onwards. Yet, despite the time since, our re-reading of these texts today is still so relevant for our current turbulent moment regarding border regimes, migration, mobile Black populations but also modernity and the promise of the city.

TA There's another thing in the biography of Peter Abrahams. He actually goes to live in Jamaica Ten years after writing Mine Boy, he moves to Jamaica, settles and dies there. So he had this crossover of worlds — which is serendipitous as our circulation is trying to connect Johannesburg, Kingston, and London.

MMThere's probably a set of Pan African threads that connect them that will not be too difficult to trace, once we start reading more closely. To return to your question about a glossary, it stems from the sense that we need to develop new languages, new vocabularies to make sense of these connections and what it means to live inside turbulence. That's what the glossary project, in part, is about — yes, it’s about citation, but also recognising the need for new languages.

TAWe've both expressed that we’re actually more interested in a language of unbelonging than anything else. That's what we figured out. Rather than the binary notions of ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere, essentially, what does it mean to belong nowhere?

MMYes, what does it mean to navigate the fog, the blur and the subterranean?

KOOZ Some friction can be productive. There are certain vocabularies or terminologies that change in relational meaning to you, even if they don't fully belong to you, right? I'd like to hear more about what you're trying to do with these literary modes of thinking.

TAAt the moment, we have two incubator projects that we're developing concurrently. Mpho, you ended up on the title ‘After Extraction’ as part of your Library of Circulations with Chimurenga — and for now, mine is called Walking as Repair. The longer title is Walking as Repair: Migrant epistemologies and cartographies of extraction between London and Kingston. I’m hoping to work through this idea of ambulatory writing, which is essentially to write on the move, or to think about movement as a method. I'm interested in generating an imagination that is in circulation. A folding of London and Kingston into one another for a layered understanding of both places: writing London from Kingston, and Kingston from London, trying to be in ambulation simultaneously.

To return to Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is also to think about language. His text was written in Trinidadian patois, so the interpretation of this place, London, is also reconceived through the creole language. I think it’s really important to think about architecture through literary references. Who might help us to articulate a position today, in this hostile, impossible world? You need literary figures — that's my feeling around it.

KOOZ Let's think more about belonging, unbelonging and the productive inability to see yourself as belonging to a place. Could you share any examples or citations to identify this impossibility of belonging?

TAI came to identify with Johnny Pitts' term Afropean. It captures an everydayness, but also an undercurrent of violence that comes with being Black in Europe. Pitts gives us an entry because of the imagery that is both in the book, but the photography that also accompanies it — that's also its success for me, in its relationship between image and text.

KOOZ It makes me think of the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, in that clip where he states that Europe is not his centre. Actually he refers to language; speaking in French, he notes the French don't speak his language. “Europe is not my centre [...] I myself am the sun.” Even though I have no claim to it, my friction with the term Afropean is somewhere in there.

MMI want to meet these ‘Afropeans’. I have a lot of questions — but I'm new here. They say when a new chicken enters the coop, it has to stand on one leg. I wonder how much longer one has to stand on one leg.

KOOZ Until it feels safe to put both feet down?

MMI've given up on two things, or at least I’m in a state of suspension about them: one is safety and the other is belonging. So the project for me is creating other spaces. We are part of an initiative to incubate new ideas that promote spatial justice and environmental justice. To nurture spatial justice work and create a community — an intellectual and political community of people with shared concerns. It's not centralised and we all have different ways of entering it.

As part of my specific project ‘After Extraction’, I just hosted a test kitchen and dinner party with food anthropologist and geologist, Ozoz Sokoh, that explores the theme of lobi — a Lingala name for the future, the past and the present. How do we curate parties and playlists that speak to this idea of futurity, from a site often characterised by mineral extraction and violence — ecocide, but also war? The idea of working across multiple terrains is also a question of visibility and sight: these important moments of encounter and density that can be incredibly joyful and convivial. So on the one hand, I can’t belong here but on the other, I have the remit to do this real work — to make space for that scholarship.

KOOZ In what ways do you want to make this instrumental? Mpho, you perhaps started to sketch out how — through this initiative with the Congolese diaspora — something fruitful can diffuse out of the institution.

MMIt's just doing the work that I've always done, which is assembling publics, gathering people, imagining futures. I am deeply mindful about the politics of time, the racialisation of time, and the way that we don't have the same twenty four hours. Black people, people of colour, women, and immigrants, our time is different. There are constant demands on our time, such that we are often in a state of ‘lateness,’simply waiting or queuing (which I’ve written about elsewhere). It’s a complex temporality out of which to craft spaces where we do imaginative work and also can have difficult or ludic conversations.

TAThere's a reality where this work needs to go beyond our actual remit at formal institutions of learning and involve a much more global audience, than to be tied to the institution itself.

MMI absolutely agree: my audience and my communities are diffuse. My primary interest is the Black diaspora, which is both local and global. It's just a fact that this dispersal has concentrations or lands differently in different places. Part of our Triangulations project is about finding a language or a vocabulary that allows us to engage that meaningfully.

KOOZ I'm interested in this notion of vocabulary; there's a sort of liberty in being able to express oneself in a language that's not constrained by the host.

TAI remember that the two of us were offering up some initial impressions or interpretations for spatial justice. Mpho spoke about the hair salon in Johannesburg, which reminded me of a short text that I wrote about a decade ago, called Barbershop Habits — about going to get my haircut by my Jamaican barber. (By the way, whenever I say that I’m going to see my barber to my colleague Mohamad, he thinks that I’m saying baba, meaning father — which I find hilarious.) Anyway, in that text, I wrote something like:

“Our conversations were coloured by Ted's thick Jamaican patois. But even with these missed connections, I trusted his expertise, sanctioning permission into my head space.”

There was something in this ceremonial space for cross-cultural exchange, the spatial intimacy; despite the unfamiliarity of the language. In some ways, I felt both a kind of refuge in that space, but at the same time, unable to be fully present or to fully participate.

The boundary and the border is a dimension that is constantly recalibrated, articulated and experienced in the city. One can experience the salon as a space of intimacy, comfort and refuge while the women working in that space are also experiencing it as a point of flux, a dense concentration of power, and policing national boundaries. So it's a space of proliferation too, and maybe that's what makes it such a complex space: you can have intimacy and proliferation happening simultaneously, recalibrating borders and micro territories. Conceptually, whether it's the barbershop or the braiding salon, there's already a grammar there, which I think is interesting. It operates conceptually as a way to think about points of connection, but also specificity.

KOOZ Hearing you describe your own displaced situation — displacement in terms of your recent appointment at a ‘new’ host institution, as well as geographic transplantation — makes total sense of this project and the scale of negotiating place through language, through phrases, through the slippages that might occur.Faced with the need to communicate with your colleagues, the scale of a word is something that can be negotiated — a scale that seems both intimate but also essentially expansive.

MMI think that the most vital thing is the misunderstanding; the slippages are actually productive. It goes back to what Thomas was saying about barber-Baba — the idea is not necessarily to fix meanings, but to break them open. I think you're right about this process of unfolding terms or concepts, sometimes misreading them, misunderstanding them, mispronouncing them, speaking them in a different accent, and making that okay. That’s where the creative work might be. Sam Selvon’s work is especially relevant because of his particular interest in dialect, language and how the English language itself is transformed through the immigrant and migrant experience.

TA To add to this idea of decoding: even though I am seemingly the insider-resident, your process of searching and dislocation is actually helping me to see more clearly what it means to occupy or be at the institution, and my relationship to it. And I hope, in some small way, I'm helping decode things for you too.

I was recently part of a campaign project for Stephen Lawrence Day (22nd of April). And this has made me think about the site of the bus-stop — the nondescript site where Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered in 1993 in Eltham. When I was talking about this to another beneficiary of the Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation, it became apparent that this part of south London has changed contextually and socially in these last 32 years. My understanding is that Eltham is really no longer a suburb; it has been folded into the city. So there's something about how you read a place over time, how these particular sites of injustice have evolved but their racial and political scars are still present and can be both a space of mobility but also immobilisation. These sites within London are very much about contested ideas of belonging and unbelonging; if Stephen's murder is one example, Grenfell is another.

This brings me to our recent conversations on ways to think elementally about architecture: about fire, air, soil, the underground. How do we reposition or rethink architectural education from these elements? In the case of fire, I’ve been thinking about how we engage community with the Grenfell disaster, far beyond the technical implications. I'll soon be doing a talk about resistance in response to Grenfell with Dhelia Snoussi, former activist in residence at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre. We need to understand the social and political constitutions of Grenfell — and the ways it gets politicised or depoliticised. We can also talk about the relationship and solidarity between Grenfell and Gaza: what's present, what's absent, what's visible, what's invisible. Grenfell is a site to which I'm constantly returning; the citation is constantly evolving around it., I just cannot ignore Grenfell or Gaza in this context. I think it's important that we still stay situated and sit with it.

To come back to the idea of slippage, I think that creates a place in which you can enable radical spatial imagination: if you are trying to form within the limits and boundaries, you can't imagine another world, or worlds. That's absolutely what we're trying to think about in relation to the institution.

KOOZ Can we talk about some of these potential spaces of rupture or slippage, terms that offer the possibility to radically stretch meaning?

MMWhat Thomas is saying about expansive, imaginative engagements with the practice of citation is really important. It goes back to other practices of reading collectively. What we aim to do is to open up a space where we can think with and through hidden landscapes and spatial imaginaries that we are exploring with Abrahams and Selvon and many others, to discuss how these are tied to questions of circulation, migration, resettlement — especially in the wake of climate change, and in the aftermath of empire.

Secondly, whether it's the hair salon or the bus stop, if we start to think creatively around questions of citation, the site always offers a possibility for an imaginative rupture. Who are we citing? Who are we reading? Which artists are we in conversation with? Which theorists, which histories, which archives; what constitutes an archive? Then, where are the subversive and structural possibilities that exist for displaced or dislocated people? This allows us to imagine sites differently, whether it's in Kingston or London or Johannesburg or elsewhere.

TAYou could argue that a text like The Lonely Londoners, written in a creolised English, is another rupture, a form of cultural decolonisation. I think it's really powerful. Part of the larger and longer term project is to collect and collate and create these kinds of practices.

MMThis idea of an imaginative archive and the citations that we bring to enrich language is very necessary. Another project around vocabulary can begin to unsettle this space. Because AI and technology are not outside of politics or racialisation or regimes of gender; they actually can end up embedding them in all kinds of problematic ways that have implications for the future and how knowledge is shaped.

KOOZ I feel so much kinship to this project, because it’s about giving people the agency to marshall their own vocabularies, their own voices, their own language. The established architectural canons can enforce certain constrained ways of looking, yet there are many parts of the planet that have been creatively shaped by other modes of thinking. It’s not for me to prescribe one over another but rather to ask, what are yours? Because we need to offer challenges and alternatives to the structures that are so often prescribed.

MMOne of the first people we spoke to as part of this lexicon project was Mindy Seu, who talks about gathering as a feminist practice. A colleague recently shared that they don't have the capacity to generate work on their own, that they need the energies of others. I think that what they crave is the political importance of gathering and collectivity; conviviality as a political project. We live in a regime that is not only death-dealing, but that also functions through individualisation and atomisation. Part of the project is also about developing formats that enable and support modes of gathering at multiple scales, and communicating that — so other people feel emboldened or encouraged to do the same in their own locales.

TAThe more I think about it, what we're trying to do with ‘Dark Triangulations’ isn't necessarily to add another glossary to the many that are evolving, but to think meaningfully about the relationship, the overlap, the rupture between image and text that creates these new forms of spatial imagination, which itself might not even be called a glossary, but be something else all together.

KOOZ The fugitive possibilities of not being recognised, of not being understood.

MMYeah. I think that they are fugitive. Legacy Russell, who wrote Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) expands on thinking about these misunderstandings as actually necessary and productive for imagining a world that hasn't been like a totalised universe. It takes us back to Thomas, your first talk at the Bartlett where you talked about freedom as not a singular thing. That's where opacity becomes meaningful; in the face of power that wants transparency, in order to penetrate everything all the time, to be totalising and fixed.

MMBut it’s also in the way that power is encoded in language; that's why so many people struggle in English with pronouns, right? There's something that also is embedded in different languages, that impose particular regimes or normalises them or renders them unthinkable.

TAWe've only just started and this conversation has been really helpful. We need more community to get us through this global displacement and turbulence.

KOOZ It's been beautiful — and for me, even restorative to listen to you. Thank you so much for making time.

Bios

Thomas Aquilina is an architect and academic dedicated to building communities of radical imagination and collective practice. He is an Associate Professor and co-director of Spatial Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His current research draws on diasporic spatial experiences in both global and local contexts from downtown Kingston in Jamaica to North Kensington in London. Thomas is co-director of New Architecture Writers, an experimental pedagogic project based in London. Before his role at The Bartlett, Thomas lectured at the Royal College of Art, London Metropolitan University and London School of Architecture, where he was the inaugural Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation Fellow.

Mpho Matsipa is a South African-born design researcher, curator and urban theorist rooted in African design thinking across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds. She is an Associate Professor and co-director of Spatial Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her work explores southern urbanisms and the circulation of ideas, aesthetics, people and spatial practices. A former Fulbright scholar, Mpho has held joint appointments as a research fellow at WiSER, a co-investigator on an Andrew Mellon grant on African futures, and a chancellor's fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is working on African Mobilities – A Library of Circulations in collaboration with Chimurenga, dividing her time between Johannesburg, London, Lagos, and New York.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.