Matri-Archi(tecture)

Podcast channel by collective Matri-Archi

Matri-Archi(tecture) is an intersectional collective that brings together African womxn of colour for the empowerment and development of African cities and spatial education. Our MA soundtrack is designed by Bonolo Thomas (Under Pressure Sundays) and titled Hustling. This is our podcast channel.

  1. Peeling Away at Patriarchy: Prof Mahmood Mamdani on Scholarship as Activism

    04/21/2019

    Peeling Away at Patriarchy: Prof Mahmood Mamdani on Scholarship as Activism

    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.

    8 min
  2. Expression as Knowledge: Sustaining Cities Through Socio-Spiritual Construction

    04/21/2019

    Expression as Knowledge: Sustaining Cities Through Socio-Spiritual Construction

    This MA episode is a component of a written article which features a significant amount of images which we encourage you to visit in the original post at www.matri-archi.com for maximum understanding and relating. This episode focuses on the construction of west African city Djenne in Mali. The plastering process of applying mud annually in this comparatively rural city brings together its residents in a spiritual festival to physically participate. This episode speaks about participation, and the importance of treating spiritual activity as an important factor in spatial practice, through Djenne as a current example. The city of Djenne is a living city, that faces death in the case that its residents, its users, are no longer allegiant to its existence. This episode introduces themes of impermanence as African architecture. Furthermore, it describes not only the beauty of these participatory processes, but additionally, the sustainability and logic of these construction methods. This particular episode asks evocative questions, challenging and imploring traditional western architecture schools of thought to thinking with intersectionality at the core of context and construction to not only evolve local building, but to ensure that these cities do not disappear with a disappearing youth sitting on computers, where these forms of knowledge can sometimes only be stored in participation and demonstration. This episode is narrated and written by Khensani de Klerk; originally published as an article on February 4th 2018.

    13 min

About

Matri-Archi(tecture) is an intersectional collective that brings together African womxn of colour for the empowerment and development of African cities and spatial education. Our MA soundtrack is designed by Bonolo Thomas (Under Pressure Sundays) and titled Hustling. This is our podcast channel.