Finalist for Sol Plaatje University Graduation Hall competition, Kimberly, In Partnership with Lemon Pebble Architects.
Our proposal imagines the site as a living archive for collective memory and a space of engagement, for voicing erased narratives and marginalised histories. The memory of erasure is inscribed onto and into the building form itself – as cuts, identified to open-up space, to give access, to make penetrable and porous – spaces of power and privilege. The cuts through the facade and building express the wounds of a violent history of extractive and exploitative processes.
The building carries the burden of these heavy histories and reveals a dialogue about the past as a way of looking forward. A religious building that once stood on the site is reconstructed as an evocation container – as a living archive for collecting and collective memory.
