In 2025 I joined a collaborative research initiative as one of five project leads, bridging UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and the Wits School of Arts (Department of Fine Arts and School of Architecture and Planning) alongside Bettina Malcomess, Polly Gould, Zen Marie, and Brigitta Stone-Johnson. The project examined writing, editing, and listening as critical tools for navigating the persistent binaries of north and south, center and periphery, text and edit — working through the concept of the edit as both metaphor and methodology.
The project extended a line of inquiry I opened in Navigating the What-What, my 2023 essay for Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge, which used Jane Rendell’s Site-Writing to interrogate the positional discomfort of speaking from a “Southern” position while tethered to a “northerly” institution. Here, that same reflective-animation method was returned to as a field note and tested against new ground, across a programme that ran between Johannesburg and London through the year, supported by a UCL–Wits Strategic Partner Fund.
The Johannesburg leg opened in January with a gathering at Wits School of Arts and a walk through the city’s ridges and its uitvalgrond — the leftover, unclaimed edges of Johannesburg’s layered history — from the Top of Africa at the Carlton Centre down to Fordsburg. I presented alongside Polly Gould on methods in practice, situating site writing and reflective animation within my broader research on spatial justice and reparative design.
By April, the group’s attention had turned to sound: cave recordings, river walks, and elevator journeys recorded with binaural microphones, anchored in the elemental materials of water, rock, brick, and air. The route ran from the Bothongo Wonder Cave to Ponte City, to the daylight point of the Jukskei River in Bez Valley and its re-emergence in Alexandra, to a chance concert at Smoking Kilis bar, a water tank hidden in a ridge, and further out to Limpopo. That workshop, facilitated by Bettina Malcomess, produced Pulses, Songs, Silences: What Are We Hearing? — a riso-printed publication assembled with francis burger at Wits School of the Arts, working through the city’s elusive, fragmentary ontologies to ask what it means to “listen the city into being.” In May, the same questions travelled to London, with a sound-journey leg culminating in a presentation led by Lolo Ntsewa and Bettina Malcomess at the Festival of Architectural Writing.
Full project notes and programme: betweenthetextandtheedit.notion.site
