AHT Lecture Series Online - Semester #2

28 July 
10am - 11am
COMPOSING OF SEPARATE PARTS: DOING RESEARCH ON THE ARCHITECTURE OF LUANDA (ANGOLA)
—Lecture by António Tomas 

António Tomas is an Associate Professor at the GSA where he is the convenor for the post-professional Masters programme. His book  In the skin of the city: Luanda or the dialectics of Spatial transformation, will soon be published by Duke University Press. The book is “an ethnographic description of how Luanda has come about, how its inhabitants have transformed it from a colonial into a postcolonial city, their lived experiences and how they have reflected upon this transformation.

4 August 
10am - 11am
ADVOCATING FOR ARCHITECTURE
— Lecture by Doreen Adengo

11 - 12pm
FRAMING AN ARCHIVE: SNAPSHOTS FROM ARCHITECTURAL (HI)STORIES OF AFRICA
—Lecture by Kuukuwa Manful 

Doreen Adengo is an architect based in Kampala, Uganda. Her practice, Adengo Architecture, is grounded in research and multidisciplinary collaboration.  Much of Doreen’s work is focused on communicating the value of design in African cities. In a context where non-designers often build their own homes and other structures, she believes that it’s critical to make the case that architects and urban planners can improve people’s everyday lives, helping cities develop sustainably. After completing her undergraduate and graduate studies at the Catholic University and Yale, respectively, Doreen worked for design firms in London, Washington DC, and New York. She has taught at The New School and Pratt Institute in New York and at Uganda Marty's University, and until recently served as a visiting critic at University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture. She is a recipient of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Mellon Fellowship on the project Centring Africa. https://www.adengoarchitecture.com/

Kuukuwa Manful is currently a PhD candidate at SOAS. She is an architect from Ghana with interests in African architectural history and social architecture. In addition to a Master of Architecture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, she has an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, UK. Her previous research explored the positioning of Ghanaian architects in the modernist movement, the concept of Asante architectural identity towards the design of urban buildings in Kumasi and social acceptance of earth building in urban areas. She curates Adansisem, an architecture collective that researches and documents Ghanaian architecture theory, research and practice and has recently been awarded a British Library Endangered Archives Grant which she will use to digitise an architectural archive in Accra. Kuukuwa’s research project examines African nation-building and notions of citizenship through the architecture of West African secondary schools constructed by states between 1945 and 1965. http://www.accraarchive.com/

11 August 
10am - 11am
LEARNING TO SPEAK: ARCHITECTURE’S (POST)COLONIAL POLITICS
— Lecture by Tariq Toffa

Tariq Toffa is an architect and writer, and a lecturer in the architecture department at the University of Johannesburg, which he joined in 2013. He completed his professional architectural studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and followed this with research-based studies, holding a Masters in architectural research from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) and studying religious and constitutional law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). His research interests include the socio-spatial histories of colonialism and apartheid, urbanisms in the contemporary city and, more broadly, critical thinking around tradition, modernity and decoloniality in space, education and society. He has taught across the under- and post-graduate architecture schools in Design, Theory, Research Methodology, Landscape and Presentation, and coordinates and conceptualises the History and Theory of Architecture teaching/research stream in the department.

18 August
10am - 11am
1ST FLOOR | NORTH BLOCK | THE DRILL HALL PRECINCT
14/15/16 TWIST STREET | JOUBERT PARK | JOHANNESBURG—Lecture by Malose Malahlela of Keleketla! 

Malose Malahela co-founding artistic director of Keleketla! Library. Keleketla! Library is an arts archive, educational workshop and performance space based in Johannesburg and over the years was nominated for the ‘Vera List Prize in Art and Politics’ (2014) and the ‘Visible Awards’ ( 2017). Keleketla!'s international invitations includes the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2018), Art Basel (2019) and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Keleketla! presents a legacy of multifaceted cultural presentations: literary, film, music, visual art and other not yet defined forms. At the Drill Hall (2007-2014) Keleketla! led complex and exciting cultural work there and across the city, notable undertakings include: ‘Nonwane’ (2011), a multi-site, multi-sensory meditation on the literary works of Phaswane Mpe and K Sello Duiker, and the music of Moses Molelekwa, taking place at Wits School of Arts, Braamfontein, and The Summit Club in Hillbrow.
View Revista Mesa 

25 August
10am - 11am
LANDSCAPES OF LEISURE AND COLOUR IN SOUTHERN AFRICA— REFLECTIONS ON BEIRA AND JOHANNESBURG
—Lecture by Pamila Gupta

11am - 12pm
—Lecture by Dominique Malaquais

Pamila Gupta is Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research explores Lusophone (post)colonial links and legacies in India and Africa. She has published in Interventions, South African Historical Journal, African Studies, Social Dynamics, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Ler Historia, Ecologie & Politique, and Public Culture. She has recently co-edited thematic special issues for Feminist Theory, Radical History Review, and Critical Arts. She is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (UNISA, 2010). Her monograph entitled The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the  Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India was published by Manchester University Press (2014). Her newest collection of essays entitled Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography was recently published with Bloomsbury Academic Press (2019). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/portuguese-decolonization-in-the-indian-ocean-world-9781350043657/

Dominique Malaquais is Senior Researcher at CNRS (Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris, France) and co-director, with Kadiatou Diallo, of the experimental curatorial platform SPARCK (Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge). Her work addresses intersections between political violence, economic inequity and the making of urban cultures in the late capitalist present.  Recent projects include reflections on Africa-Asia exchanges as effected through the visual arts, literature, urbanism and spirituality (Afrique-Asie:  arts, espaces, pratiques, co-edited with Nicole Khouri and published in 2016) and Archive (re)mix (2015), a collection of essays on the production of art, visual and textual, as an exercise in exploring archival materials and techniques, co-edited with Maëline Le Lay and Nadine Siegert. Malaquais sits on the editorial board of several journals and reviews (Chimurenga, Politique africaine, Savvy, among others) and is Past President of ACASA, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.

1 September
10am - 11am
COVID-19: SPATIAL INEQUALITY IS THE SUPER SPREADER
—Lecture by Melissa Myambo

11am - 12pm
READING BUILDINGS
— Lecture by Ângela Ferreira 

Dr. Melissa Tandiwe Myambo is a writer, researcher and fitness instructor.  After earning her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, she was a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town where she taught in the sociology department and then a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the International Institute at University of California, Los Angeles where she taught in the Department of Comparative Literature and the International Development Studies program.  Her research interests span political economy to postcolonial literature and urban space to sociology because she draws on both the Humanities and Social Sciences to make sense of the changing global cultural economy of the 21st century.  She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru scholar. Her current research project, The Politics of Blood: Frontier Migration to China, India and South Africa in a Changing Global Economy explores “highly-skilled” migration from “developed” countries such as the US to the “developing” economies of China, India and South Africa, a process she terms frontier migration.  She examines why these frontier migrants are heading to the “global South” and where they work, live, send their children to school, socialize etc. in their new homes.  Within contemporary frontier migration, Melissa also explores frontier heritage migration – the African and Asian diasporas raised in the global North who are now “returning” to their globalizing homelands.

Ângela Ferreira, born in 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique, grew up in South Africa and obtained her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She lives and works in Lisbon, teaching Fine Art at Lisbon University, where she obtained her doctorate in 2016. Ferreira’s work is concerned with the ongoing impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society, an investigation that is conducted through in-depth research and distillation of ideas into concise and resonant forms. https://angelaferreira.info/