Composed of designers, thinkers, organisers and writers, the South African collective Rural Futurisms uses storytelling, oral histories and speculative technologies to investigate, explore and address climate change. In this exchange, members of the group reflect on the meanings of archive and lexicon in the context of Tswana spatiality.

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

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ As a collective, Rural Futurisms is engaged in the practice of decolonisation of the archive through design and south-hemisphere perspectives on climate change and climate justice. What do you define as the archive?

RURAL FUTURISMS As a collective we acknowledge that an archive is fundamentally a repository of knowledge. How that is manifest can vary across geographies in how the repository is spatialised or embodied and in how the knowledge itself is defined, valued, or categorised. It can be spatial, ritual and relational.

For our work in Makgobistad, South Africa and thinking about the constellation of Tswana villages around the town Mahikeng, we are confronted by coloniality and the distortion of history and therefore design and the archive. Speculation, thus, becomes a useful tool for us in filling the gaps within the colonial archives but also filling outside those gaps through acknowledging more casual spaces in what we might simply call home. Speculative approaches also give agency to communities that have historically been excluded from these processes.

Rural Futurisms is navigating the complexities of archive building in its speculative digital archive of engagements in Makgobistad. This archive, shaped through ongoing interactions with the local community, challenges the colonial legacy of archaeology, which has historically rendered rural African communities incapable of preserving their own histories. By looting artefacts and reframing their narratives, colonial institutions have transformed living stories into static objects, stripped of their voice and purpose.

KOOZ To what extent does this process of decolonisation start from redefining a lexicon?

RF For us at Rural Futurisms the decolonial approach manifests in multiple dimensions in which the lexicon is one. Namely:

1) shifting the focus of the trajectory of design from urban to rural where design occurs horizontally;
2) contending with the hybridity of rurality in its traditional and contemporary aspirations;
3) language and lexicon are implicated in understanding any kind of situated knowledge.

Decolonisation does not require pre-colonial nostalgia but instead centers on understanding knowledge systems that operate outside colonial registers. It can begin from understanding that which is non-colonial which does not have to strictly exist in a pre-colonial timeline, but can exist as space or place that functions outside of the colonial imperial register. In Makgobistad, merely seeking to understand and engage with Tswana design without needing to justify it within Western scholarship – what Dr Julian Raxworthy describes as prescribing indigenous to a renaissance zero point – becomes an act of reclamation and resistance. Working on lexicon is not about finding synonyms for “architecture” but uncovering how the Tswana language inherently describes design, spatiality, and relationality. It’s about allowing these ways of knowing to inform design processes authentically.

KOOZ I would like to focus on your platform, maybe starting from the will to not translate the menu in English with the exception of the word “archive”. Could you share some insight into this digital space and how you explore this tool?

RF This is a great observation! “Ka archive a re bua” roughly means, “let’s talk about the archive”. In Setswana, there’s no direct equivalent for a spatial repository of knowledge. This absence highlights the difference in how knowledge is organised and valued in Tswana culture – relationally and communally rather than institutionally. By acknowledging this tension through the word archive, we equip ourselves to utilise this tension as a decolonial compass.

In the menu on our website, we are contending with and responding to this term “archive” and its implications on previous attempts to define Tswana spatiality. We are bringing into the conversation the archives of Tswana history that exist, and bridging this interpretation of spatiality with relationality.

The platform aims to bridge conversations with artefacts. The tool allows a visitor to speculatively explore representations of artefacts not living in museums but in the homes of custodians of Tswana culture. The platform borrows a likeness of the objects, enough to spark the imagination on cosmology, technicity and essence. The platform borrows voices and conversation, enough to broaden an understanding of these objects and elude to this very essence. The platform also surmises a lexicon from these intersections of objects and conversations to map out what else design can respond to.

KOOZ This month the “archive” element of the platform was launched and can be navigated through a directory of conversations through which you hope to extract a lexicon of Makgobistad terminology. What prompted this project? What is the potential of this lexicon?

RF The project arose from the discontent with South African architectural education's erasure of local traditions. While architecture and landscape architecture were framed through Eurocentric precedents, the lived realities of peri-urban and rural communities were ignored. This gap sparked a curiosity to recover the unacknowledged spatial histories of places like Makgobistad. These histories, though absent from formal curricula, live in the practices, stories, and artefacts of the people who inhabit these spaces.

Language is an important repository and compass of value, relationality to environment and most definitely design. It is particularly important in the absence of a physical knowledge repository particularly in the context of Makgobistad where traditional knowledge is embedded in oral history. Already here, the absence of the archive as a spatial repository guides us to other modes of knowledge preservation which we know here to be embodied, spoken and fluid.

We certainly appreciate the phrasing of this question because indeed our stance is that the collection of the design lexicons in such villages is a productive act that we aim to utilise not as synonyms for architecture, but as synonyms to what design can respond to. For us the absence of clear translatable terms is an opportunity to learn a different register of design. We are not only interested in the lexicon of objects or practice, but also in the language of technical essence and how we can design differently. An example of how the Setswana language teaches us how design can function differently can be witnessed in how hut building was historically the realm of women and a translation of womanhood in Tswana villages which surfaces in evolutions of the term aga (build), moagi (builder), boagisane (building together but also neighbouring, working together and care).

KOOZ I would like to go back to the physical to understand the relationship between this lexicon and the work you have been undertaking with the people of Makgobistad within the context of the South Design project. What is the potential of this project beyond the process of archiving?

RF The lexicon does more than document – it catalyses design and action. By collaborating with Makgobistad's community, we aim to foster knowledge exchange, ensuring that interventions resonate with local aspirations. We position the lexicon as a tool for advocacy, influencing policies that centre rural needs in climate justice and sustainable development. We think of the lexicon as enabling us to invite global spatial practitioners to consider how digital tools can amplify rural voices and histories while redefining legibility, power, and value in the structures of design. The process creates prototypes for ecological regeneration projects, such as quarry rehabilitation, blending traditional and bio-based materials. Therefore, in many ways, the lexicon is a foundation for activating projects that extend into tangible ecological and social transformations.

KOOZ The Polyglot issue stems from the belief that new planetary relationships begin with a new vocabulary. Your work instead invites us to engage with the ancestral, where it is not so much about the new but embracing what at first might appear as mistranslations. What is the potential of these mistranslations in the discourse around climate change and climate justice?

RF We conceive of mistranslations as not errors but rather as opportunities to reveal alternative paradigms. In the context of climate change and justice, engaging with mistranslations shifts the focus from “global solutions” to plural, localised responses, respecting the nuances of diverse geographies and cultures. This is the crux of Rural Futurisms’ work: embracing the richness of Tswana cosmology and rurality as a lens to rethink global challenges. By positioning the archive as a site of conversation, mistranslations, and encoding, this work reimagines what it means to both document and design. It invites global spatial practitioners to consider how digital tools can amplify rural voices and histories while redefining legibility, power, and value in the structures of design.

Bio

Rural Futurisms is a collective of primarily research-focused writers, designers, cultural practitioners, and historians dedicated to decolonising the archive and co-curating imaginaries for Southerly rural futures in the face of climate change and social inequity. The group believes in working collaboratively with rural South African communities to ensure that opportunities and resources empower the custodians of these futures. Rural Futurisms strives to develop methods and practices that centre community agency, knowledge, and cosmologies.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.