Matri-Archi(tecture‪)‬ Podcast channel by collective Matri-Archi

This MA Peeling Away at Patriarchy features outer world musician Sun Ra and his timeless introduction and teachings on Afro-futurism as a space that transcends conventions, which he did through his music. In honour of Sun Ra and in his own words, before we begin “The first thing to do is to consider time officially ended…”

Sun Ra offered an escape for Black people in pain, all over the world. This escape was more than just a sonic distraction - it was a healing, an injection of vibrations from another realm to wake Black people up to their true fates. Sun Ra is the seed that said it could, and sprouted into the ever-growing philosophy that is Afro-Futurism. Although most view this as a future of high-tech infrastructure and science spearheaded by Black people, the politics of it are often painted over with a single stroke idea of “Community and khumbaya”. However, if we were to truly transcend the oppressive matrix created by this world, an Afro-Futuristc reality would be free of these limitations and oppressions. Some say this is impossible, but this very same impossibility is the work of Ra, the work he wanted all of us humans to engage in. Sun Ra believed the way into this impossibility was through words…

This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and written by Lehlohonolo Ndlovu; originally published as an article on March 11th 2018.

Welcome to our Peeling Away at Patriarchy series, which seeks to contribute to the equality that feminism stands for by letting you know compadres and allies in privilege positions who are contributing to transformation and intersectionality in spatial discourse. We obviously aim at making the spatial links, revealing and sharing discourse so that the development of our situated knowledges can take effect in the spatial form. To inaugurate our Peeling Away at Patriarchy (PAAP) we are featuring Professor Mahmood Mamdani. An inspirational Ugandan academic, author and critic whose thinking speaks to the intersection between politics and culture with critical explorations reimagining colonial normative entities.

This PAAP aims at emphasising that the power of intellectual sharing and acting is of great importance today, and should be practiced with caution. Collectively, as Africans, we have the ability to emancipate our local ways of understanding the world (past, present and future) in various mediums suited to supporting the value of situated knowledge. The aforementioned, all in pursuit of developing to not only breathe freely, but to live and navigate unimagined realities. This speaks directly to the inherent phenomenology that we have as humans, in whatever form we decide it to be. This humanly tendency to phenomenology is contravened through historical injustice and continues to be fettered by oppressive institutions.

This episode is narrated and written by Khensani de Klerk; originally published as an article on March 14th 2018.

Although our existence is shaped by this violence (of coloniality, of patriarchy, the violent normalisation of heterosexuality (heteronormativity), the rule of capital), we also exist outside of this; we are not only oppressed beings, our resilience and agency cannot be silenced, that is a further source of dispossession. Once again, we are ‘reckoning with the artistic expressions of the marginalised’ (McCarthy), we are looking at doing what Saidiya Hartman does when she, ‘[makes] productive sense of the gaps and silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women’.

While the idea of our beings exists in this current form, this form is not the only way that we exist and we are not the only ones who are here functioning under a regimented regulated existence, how are the animals, the plants, the water, the rivers, and oceans and trees holding up and surviving? How are we (collectively) doing? There is a deep connection between the social and the ecological, living under the ‘coloniality of being’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007).

This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and was written by Ndjha Ka; originally published as an article on February 28th 2018.

‘Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.’  -Fred Moten (2014), The Black Outdoors. This MA episode is part 2 of a two piece article which features a talk between two scholars. As an extension of Part 1, Fred Moten, ‘in his work he has consistently argued that any theory of politics, ethics, or aesthetics must begin by reckoning with the creative expressions of the oppressed’ (McCarthy, 2018). Saidiya Hartman, has written about feeling the continual legacy of slavery and ‘[making] productive sense of the gaps and silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women’.

In this talk they lead us through various questions, musings, and lingering breakthroughs. How do we get out from under the regime of everyday violences? Being outdoors is premised on an inness, does the outdoors always exist or is it also because there is an in that has been made? And what happens when we finally get out? Can we get out?

This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and was written by Ndjha Ka; originally published as an article on February 21st 2018.

This MA episode explores interconnectedness and features as a Fruit of the Week article on our website. This episode shares the personal experiences of moving through the city through the lenses of Lehlohonolo and Neo in response to Lauren Hill’s Everything is Everything song. Describing the textures and sounds of Cape Town city, this episode is an intimate commentary on the network and emotional experience, the intangibility that gives a city its sense of place and zeitgeist. This episode serves as a detailed description of the place that Cape Town is in politically, socially and segregated 2018- yet with an optimism of the undeniable interconnectedness urban dwellers have as they cross paths. Infrastructure and interconnectedness are a contested combination in Cape Town and this episode gives a unique commentary on these realities of (in)tangible mobility.

“How are we connected as human beings beyond just the physical?” - an important an often avoided question in spatial practice and education made to be objectified in an ever-present subjective urban landscape.

This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and was written by Lehlohonolo Ndlovu and Neo Twala; originally published as an article on February 14th 2018.

This MA episode is written to feature the work of two black queer womxn, as Djs they are interested in, and working on, using music as a political tool. This, while rooting the experience of the music in the feel and language that reveals itself when music is given space to breath by respecting its cultural and social setting.

A conversation featuring bell hooks and Cornel West introduced opened the door to Lynnée Denise, a Dj scholar interested in creating sensory experiences rooted in cultural histories of marginalized people. That then opened the next door to a music mix, Soulful Critical Thought: bell hooks and the making of a DJ Scholar. A revelation! It is exciting to see how music can be used in relation to theory. This mix is framed in the politics of race, class, and gender, where hooks’s voice comes in and out of the mix, her words in conversation with and dancing alongside the music. From this, we are able to feel our way through how her words take from, give to, live with and alongside the music emanating from within the dynamic culture about whom the politics discussed are centered.

This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and was written by Ndjha Ka; originally published as an article on February 7th 2018.