A Mausoleum to Pan-Africanism

During the years of the South African apartheid regime, many already-independent African countries opened their borders to political refugees and asylum seekers from South Africa. It is ironic to note that, post-democracy, South Africa has turned its back on African economic migrants and victims of forced migration from many of its neighbouring countries.

I am interested in the spatial implications of territory, migration and identity, and in pursuing an architectural inquiry that looks at notions of hybridity, fluidity and slippage as a means of generating architectural form.

The Major Design Project, A Mausoleum to Pan-Africanism, is an exploration of these themes through an interrogation of the specific geographic and spatial qualities of borderlines. The project is situated on a series of fictional ‘no-man’s land’ conditions along the borders of South Africa. It seeks to expose, critique, agitate and question the absurdities, violence and contradictions inherent in contemporary conditions of displacement and migration.