Shumi Bose:

Hi there, and welcome to the second season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-Being podcast. The Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast exploring the interconnection of our social and ecological systems. Season two of the podcast is curated under the heading Between Us, presented by the re:arc institute and KoozArch. Between Us is a series of intimate conversations shared between two critical practitioners operating across architecture, art, curation, illustration, design, and literature. Across generational and geographical space, their discussions will move through shared aspects of practice to reach infinitely larger and more pressing issues on and around the roles of cultural practice for planetary well-being. The conversations are intended to provoke still more responses and further discussions, from micro to macro, with and led by emerging and further underrepresented communities. The guests chosen for these conversations are innovative thinkers and practitioners who we believe remain committed to the critical reframing of their disciplines and their attendant discourse.

These intimate yet wide-reaching exchanges aim to reflect the need for interdisciplinary conversation and unsiloed imagination in order to attempt the realization of a more just, caring, and restorative world.

In this episode, the architect Sumayya Vally will be in conversation with curator Natasha Ginwala. You'll also hear intermittently from me. I'm Shumi Bose and I had the great pleasure of holding Natasha and Sumayya in conversation, and it's my pleasure to introduce them for you now.Sumayya Vally is founder and principal of the award-winning design, research and pedagogical practice, Counterspace. Counterspace searches for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions, both rooted and diasporic. Sumayya was the artistic director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023 and, in 2021, was the youngest-ever architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London. Her design process is often forensic and draws on the aural, performance, and the overlooked as generative places of history and work.

Natasha Ginwala is a widely published author with a focus on contemporary art, visual culture, and social justice. She's curated numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world over the past decade and is one of the five curators of the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial of Art in 2025.

I'm just so happy to be in a room talking to both of you. Thank you so much for joining. I know we've all got busy schedules taking us to all corners of the earth, sometimes according to plan, sometimes not. So, yeah, I just wanted to thank you for giving up your time today. Natasha, Sumayya, welcome. And I know that we've had a lot of exchanges, let's say, drawing some parallels between the three of us, and particularly between your two practices, thinking of various kinds of notions of inheritance and resonance across planetary and migratory concerns. And I barely feel like I need to push the button, because there's almost so much latent in your work that you could pick up. Natasha, I'm going to invite you, because you had a few thoughts that you would be putting together for Sumayya. Do you want to share some of those?

Natasha Ginwala:

Sure. Thank you so much for having us in conversation. And I do feel like the sensory facets of architecture, and architecture as a realm of bringing people together from disparate corners, is something that you have also been pursuing. And I'm just so grateful for practitioners like Sumayya. So, it's really special for me to have this chance to be in open conversation. I was just initially thinking about how my home city Ahmedabad, where I am seated right now, has inspired me in a way also in terms of built spaces, but also really thinking about the unbuilt. And that is such a special aspect of how I read Sumayya’s practice, in terms of really sensing deeply into unmaking and the unbuilt as potential grounds. And I respect that so much, because I also see it in the kinds of architectures—ancient architectures, particularly—and informal neighborhood spaces that are in this city that I was born in. I feel a sense of kinship with how you tap into these kinds of grounds, Sumayya, and kind of also read them across a kind of Afro-Asian vision, to some extent. So, yeah. I guess I just wanted to commence in that spirit of exchange.

Sumayya Vally:

Yeah, it's such an honor to be in conversation with both of you. I admire your work so much as well, Natasha. And I think you are so articulate with words and also frameworks and making space for other people to produce works in. And that's so important for us, to be able to have platforms to imagine ourselves into and to create visions from our heritages. So, the work that you do is incredibly important—both in terms of envisioning futures in what you do and in how you articulate it, but also in its generosity for making space for other people, like me, to do the same. So, thank you so much for that.

And I'm just reflecting on what you said about where you are at the moment, and the kinds of architectures that are around you. And this morning, you sent these incredible images of a stepwell, and I was so moved to see them. Of course, those architectures are architectures that I am deeply inspired by. But, just thinking about what you said now, in terms of the built and the unbuilt and those relationships— of course, architecture inherently, whatever canon or whatever discourse it's coming from, has that tension or those relations. But there are architectures, like the one you sent images of, that I think really work with choreographing elements differently to so many of what we consider canonical in the profession, in what we've inherited from the West.

And I'm saying that, for example, if we look at how water is seen as an essential part to be let into the architecture, rather than only thinking about keeping the weather out; in the stepwell, in how it's almost like parts of the architecture become a backdrop and a stage set for the choreography of so many different rituals. But also, that water is treated… The water is and of itself a character, just as people are, in those rituals. And that's really celebrated, which is really beautiful to see. And I was reminded so much of that when I saw your images this morning.

NG:

Yeah. I've been really waiting to revisit that particular stepwell, which is called the Rudabai, who is a queen in Gujarat. It's her stepwell, that is made in an area called Adalaj, and it's from the 15th century. In fact—so really, it resonated for me a lot with your style of working, thinking about porosity, about the flow of water, as you said, as something that is invited in. Rain-making practices and rain-inviting practices have been important for your work in Dhaka. I've been thinking about the stepwell also as a space of gathering that defies the proscenium and its frontality. It is a circular space and encircling space, and particularly when invited for the Sharjah Biennial, literally as a kind of very strange, serendipitous prompt, this well came to my mind. And I hadn't thought about it for years, because I've only visited it as a child. And then I heard that there were these musical concerts there recently with tabla maestros, and I was just imagining the sonority in that space, which is a five-story well. So, talking about a negative ground—that's just phenomenal, right? I'm here for unfortunate reasons this time, but it allowed me to have the joy of sitting there, before us recording this conversation and before heading to Sharjah. So, I don't know, but the more I've dived into some of the recent projects, I really sense how the spaces of water are the channels of hospitality and nourishment. And that is also very evident for projects like the Islamic Biennial and specific projects, too, that you shared there. So, yeah.

SB:

Yeah. It's just sort of admiring the parity between your experiences and concerns. We could talk about the experiences and concerns that you have tried to frame in the Islamic Biennale in Jeddah that took place last year. This time last year, right? Or even, I'm thinking about the various planetary and migratory routes that you've both traced in your work. Let's talk about Sharjah for a moment, as Natasha, you brought it up, and maybe your experience at Jeddah, too, Sumayya—how was that? Working on that scale and again, in that context?

SV:

Yeah. I think it was really exciting to be working at that scale, as you said, Shumi. And Natasha, I just also wanted to say that all four of my grandparents are from not too far away from where you are now. My heritage is very rooted in Gujarat and my grandparents moved over just before Partition. So, there's definitely a resonance, I think, in the architectures that are surrounding you, that I think I've embodied subconsciously to a degree. And it also gives me great joy to imagine you sitting in those architectures now.

I think there's so much to be said in terms of these architectures of gathering that have so much architectural and formal language but, as you said, they're not frontal and the attitude of projection is somehow very different. And by that same token, I'm going to make an analogy to my work at the Islamic Biennale. Because on the one hand, to work at that scale, in terms of architectural scale, it was a really massive project—almost 30,000 square meters of exhibition arena to work with, which allowed us to give artists platforms to make really, really large-scale projects. But, also in terms of the arena of interest to operate at that scale was mammoth, because the Islamic world—how is it defined? Do we define it by countries that are majority Muslim, or do we define it regionally? I really wanted to be able to think about all the parts of the world that Islam touches, and to bring together a diverse view of what the Islamic world is, to redraw Islamic geographies over and over again and trouble what they can be.

And from that perspective, the scale is really vast, because what the term "Islamic art" can encompass then becomes very, very generous. And it's not defined by chronology or geography or style and aesthetic, but really by methods of practice, by arenas of resonance, by modes of experience that are akin to Islamic practice. And although, physically, the biennale was in Jeddah—it takes place now every two years in Jeddah, I worked on the inaugural one—and it's such a specific site, but that site tangentially draws roots everywhere across the world. Because even though the holy cities are the cradle of Islam, because of the pilgrimage and because of the ways that people have moved through the region, it really is a space that has, on the one hand, absorbed the DNA of the whole world. And that's so visible in the dialect of what's called the Hejaz—Mecca, Medina and Jeddah—in its food, its sound, in so many of its belief systems and mythologies. And that, in a way, is quite different to what's called Najd or other regions in Saudi Arabia. I think the Hejaz is really, really seen as this completely hybrid region that has really, really embodied the DNA of the world. It has also then transmitted its own culture to the rest of the world.And so, I think I had to be conscious of operating, on the one hand, at this very local scale, to think about—and I'm sure you're also thinking about similar things—that a biennale is really a seismograph of what's happening in the city. And for Jeddah in particular, the region in Saudi Arabia is experiencing this moment of cultural change. And I wanted to be able to think about that, but also to reflect back on the culture that it has always had. And Jeddah has particularly always had so much cosmopolitanism, particularly because of Islam. To be able to celebrate that, also at this large architectural scale, was an immense honor. I just want to add very quickly that, of course, because this was the first one, we did a lot of research, and I did a lot of personal research on other biennales. And, of course, Sharjah is such a strong platform and such an incredible emblem for what a biennale can do, in terms of generating discourse from perspectives of difference, in terms of really working with a regional conversation and putting forth imaginations that are different to what we see in so many other biennales. What's it been like in the process of starting to conceptualize the theme? And I'm really interested to hear more about your approach—whatever you can share at the moment.

NG:

Yeah, we are now around a year away. We have been working on it for quite a while. I think having worked on quite a few biennials, I quite enjoy that arc, which goes from privateness to publicness. And so, really starting with the way one senses the city, but also the sort of wisdoms that are passed on by artists and by local residents of that place, and how those start to make the vision more and more dense and populated as one continues one's work in biennial-making. Sharjah, in that sense, was not an alien place. Like you said, its legacy deeply resonated with me. I felt that that is one biennial that I'd like to be part of, which didn't immediately bring that sense of fatigue, but that sense that, actually, this model can be renewed and recharged from that kind of space.

Again, just going back to wells, because that is an inspiration for me. When I was working on an exhibition in Sharjah a few years ago with the artist Bani Abidi, we had her solo exhibition in the building Bait Al Serkal that is a space that has been a home, but also a hospital. And so, it has this space of caregiving and also kind of… feels a space for intimate congregation. And one of the rooms on the ground floor has these indoor wells. And that space, again, really spoke to me, and I sort of started to again think about the presence of water indoors and water in wells as a space of, also, subversive memory-keeping, as a place where laments are remembered from.

And this resonated with how we were also actually working at that time... I guess when the invitation came also from Sharjah, it was a very particular moment around the last March meeting, where Abdullah Ibrahim was playing in concert in Sharjah, and he played Water From An Ancient Well. I don't know how you identify with that particular composition, but I just absolutely adore it. It's just got such deep vibrations of holding together nonlinear time and memory. And so, yeah, somehow hearing him play that live… All of these really brought me closer to what I wanted to do, which was to rethink deeply about water and ancestral memory. Maybe that's what I can say for now. And my travels have also been, this time, very different from other biennial research methods. I've going been going to areas of the Swahili coast, because I kind of feel like a lot of artists have worked on Sharjah in very specific ways over so many editions. And I almost felt this sense that perhaps, actually, thinking also about regionality from Gujarat, going into other spaces of connectivity, and in some ways what Swahiliness preserves that, unfortunately, has been eroded from the Gulf in many senses. Those were the ways to just excavate, very personally, and not go into that sort of “10 studio visits a day,” or nothing like that. It was just very much about informing myself, really, and very privately.

SV:

Well, that sounds like a really beautiful and incredible process. I don't think about it very often, but somehow water is also continuously present in my own work, as well. I very rarely have spoken about this, but my thesis research, when I was in masters, was about Johannesburg's mine water. I'm mentioning it, because I think there's resonance with what you described about memory and water. I think, in general, there's so much relation to land and toxicity and forms of mythmaking that are connected to the ground— but also how that ground has been disturbed and how we navigate that. So, I worked with creating a kind of pigment factory that extracted the toxic mine waste on a part of the ridge that's very, very toxic and connected to mine-waste water and mine-waste dust.And the project was really about looking at the subconscious of the city that we can't really see very often, but is ever present in our city's present and also deep future—so, that extraction from the ground, which was such a big part of what led to the formation of Johannesburg, but also played such a role in its formation as an apartheid city. These ginormous mine-waste dumps were used to segregate people. And toxicity and skin color both worked at gradients and, for example, buffer zones for white people in Johannesburg, were zoos, parks, and trees, and for Black people were mine-waste dumps or, in Cape Town, sewage plants—of course, both of them to do with water. To think about that intent on such a micro level is also very important, because I think when we think about architecture, and when you talk about planetary well-being, we really are thinking about work that is operating at all scales—from the very, very micro to the very macro. And these are all completely interconnected, from the atomic to the mythological and also the planetary, as you say.

And then I also just wanted to pick up on the Dhaka point, very quickly. So physically, water is very present in my work, over and over again. But, also I think what you're saying about the Swahili coast, and the way that we move and the ways that bodies of water have enabled so many of our identities in a way— from our own and a very personal level, to the way that macro identities operate as well. The project in Dhaka was really looking at the resonance between rain-calling rituals from South Africa—there is a very local kind of rain-calling ceremony that happens within a legion of Rain Queens and is very, very tied to a specific identity in South Africa.And I was looking more broadly at the presence of this across many cultures and found, of course, that there are resonances with practices in Bangladesh. And so, this pavilion that we created was made of vessels that were created with sand from a village outside Dhaka. And we worked with using the vessels—unfired, so they were dissolvable. And every day in the space there was a ceremony and a process of rain-calling, loosely interpreted from several geographies. And the space was washed by these young women. And over time, that pavilion also started to dissolve and evaporate. And at the end, we were left with a pile of mud that was returned back into the earth. And I think that there's also a lot of metaphor in there, for thinking about architectures, again, that embrace the weather, that work with different scales of time.

And there are so many ancestral wisdoms in the vernacular architectures of Bangladesh, especially because of its presence in relation to flood. There have been so many architectures that consider timescales very seasonally and also think about permanence very differently. Similarly in Sharjah, in very different ways, there are so many interesting architectures that think in the same way. I was recently speaking to an architect about a project in Bahrain and she mentioned, there's so much wisdom in the ways that people moved, because they didn't have to sustain being in the hot sun. And that's so much of architecture in the Gulf is really... Of course, the rate of weathering is just so exceptionally intense. And that also has to do with the conceptualization of Western architecture that tells us that things, all things, need to be built to last. I think there's something really… Or there's a medium that's really beautiful in between, in that some architectures, like the stepwell you're in, can really work over generations and others really think about timescales very, very differently.

SB:

Again, noting so many parallels. Natasha, I want to hear about the research with indigo and where it went? And which of those sorts of, let's say, migratory flows or trans-colonial, geographic and social flows that you've been dealing with—where did they lead to? And perhaps any responses that you might have to things that Sumayya has brought up too, of course.

NG:

Yeah. I particularly enjoy, in the kind of examples that Sumayya has shared, how a lot of the projects go from a very specific kind of area of practice. A lot of these practices that are recalled are quite fragile or aural or sensorial. And then, going from that specific approach to a commoning and to a space where there are alignments. And one realizes that there are echoes, like in this aspect of rain-calling practices. And again, it's just a coincidence, but we have been working with this journalist and sound artist Syma Tariq on a series of podcasts for Colomboscope called A Thousand Channels, which is named after [Édouard] Glissant. The quote from him is, "One way ashore, a thousand channels." And she worked with a younger sound artist, Bint Mbareh, who's a Palestinian sound artist who has been thinking about these rain-calling practices, and at the same time thinking about dispossession and displacement from land at the same time. So, I think that there's various ways in which, I guess, these records are then called upon and threaded through in the kind of invitations that we receive and the spaces that we make. And the exhibition is a kind of a playground. It is, in so many cases, just an impermanent language of commoning. I feel that the kind of orientation that Sumayya brings to that playground of the exhibition and its impermanence, and yet its imprints, is something that I value greatly.

To answer your question about indigo—to be honest, I think I came at it from a very personal space. I grew up studying textiles by wearing them, seeing them on the women in my family and them telling me about embroidery and indigo-dyeing. And these were things that were told, sometimes, maybe to even distract me as a child, or to just… It wasn't something that I wanted to claim. It wasn't about expertise, it was really about living with these broader understandings of the substance and its role in society. And then when I went to Kutch, when I was studying journalism, I landed up in a village called Ajrakhpur in Kutch. And that village was made after the earthquake, when the natural dyers had to move from another area called Dhamadka, because the water was no longer good for natural dyeing. Because of the earthquake, something had changed in the composition of the water and suddenly the colors weren't staying. The indigo actually wasn't as strong and didn't have the same gradient that they needed. And they slowly started to migrate and build a completely new village, which was then named after their craft.And I found that so fascinating. And I was just talking to these dyers and block-makers. And again, they are a community that live in very different areas of the region, and I was moving around just to kind of join the dots between this network of the traders of cloth, the dyers, and the block-makers. And they were just thinking, "Who are you? You are not someone who studies design. You are not an NGO worker. Why are you so interested in this?" I'm just saying this because the way I entered into research was from that realm. I was as interested in the post-earthquake migration, and this making of a new village community, as I was in the patterns, in the trade that they were engaging in. So I kind of realized… And sometimes, I guess, curators in that sense also get told off, because it's like, "You're such a generalist. What is your problem? Why can't you just focus on one element in this story?" I guess at some stage, I came to indigo in that way and I studied it and slowly, through the community I built, I started to understand what a matrix it is also within the African world, and how it connects us.And more and more I started to talk to artists based in Mali, based in Senegal and different places, who had completely different stories. And also the role of women came through in a really beautiful way, finally, because that was missing in the stories of indigo in India. At some point, I even was going to write a PhD. And slowly just felt like, "Okay. Everybody's trying to study this substance and it's something that I will just informally be fascinated with and keep learning about." But, yeah. I never consolidated, let's say, that work into one particular vessel.

SV:

I think it's so beautiful to hear you talk, because I really believe, adamantly and stubbornly, that we should be insisting more and more on complexity. And I think the fact that you were interested in this post-migration settlement and how it was created, and also the forms of pattern-making and the mythology and the connectivity of indigo as a substance and what that embodies as a metaphor for how people are connected across territory—that's really so beautiful. I was thinking about this the other day. We're so increasingly forced to be didactic, even though of course, in creative terms, there is so much more insistence on things being immersive, on works being collaborative and community-centric and participatory.But, in terms of how works are framed, and how we are also asked to frame our works, how we are asked to identify, there's so much binary and there's so much categorization. And I think it's still really important to insist on complexity, to insist on ambiguity, even sometimes as productive and generative—and also to see things as complex without morally reducing them as good or bad, or this or that, to understand that they can be all and both and everything. And to work with that complexity as generative is, for my work, very important. So very, very inspiring to listen to how you articulated that.I wonder if you are a generalist, because I think everything feels like it's led by integrity and purpose and that it is about the same thing, but how that thing manifests in different forms and different places. And I wish that I was more of a generalist, but I think in every single project I'm talking about the same thing. No matter what I think I'm talking about, when I look back at it after years, it somehow is always about the construction of belonging and about diaspora as a method—even if it's not consciously at the forefront of what I'm doing in the project at the time.

SB:

You addressed that so beautifully. Of course, I want to come back to the connecting-the-dots metaphor that you brought up, Natasha—also relating to Sumayya's own ongoing research in which I was able to share on Hijrah, on the migration, and on knowledge that travels and generates, as it does. I think I'm a bit older than both of you, and at a point where I'm really... I feel almost teenage pushing back against words and requirements that would impose these validations or value systems that are formally quantified as a PhD or such. And also, having been down many of those avenues, where I'm like, "Should I make this into my thing?" and then deciding that actually, no, my thing is the mess and the joining of the dots, and that's such a beautiful place to be. And choosing to be in the mess means that it doesn't form, necessarily, a identifiable quantity. And Sumayya, I loved your response in terms of the complexity of things. I wonder if I could ask you to speak about the Hijrah research and ways in which it relates to Natasha's work?

NG:

I just wanted to acknowledge one facet of what was shared. I realized that often our elders, in the parts of the world that we come from, are the ones who have pushed for a unity of knowledge, not a segregation of knowledge—not a compartmentalization, not a propriety that enforces a deeply capitalist wreckage on knowing and on holding wisdom. This notion of the unity of wisdom and the knowledge that is not divided into categories of specialization that alienates us from each other, first of all, and also from certain parts of the world… Realizing so much now that perhaps we actually have the responsibility, in a way, to continue to defy—while still working—that segregation, ways of alienating ourselves from what the ancestral forces have willed us into holding and sharing. And not only to use it in a way that when it is about authorship or propriety. And again, I think that is something that feels like it shapes your practice, Sumayya. I would also love to hear you talk through the question of migration in terms too, but also of pilgrimage, and how these facets of movement—forced and unforced—have then been leading you, also, in your pedagogic engagements.

SV:

Mm. Absolutely. I have been interested in this idea or this term "Hijrah," which means “migration” in Arabic. So, in Islam we have what's called the Hijri calendar. [The] Islamic calendar is called the Hijri calendar, and it's marked by the moment that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, alayhi as-salam, actually fled from Mecca to Medina because he was fleeing persecution. And that term has been present in my work for many, many years, through my work at the GSA, but also generally in my practice interests. I'm really interested in how we find form for the migratory—both in how, in physical form we can bring together different influences in the same vessel... That's what architecture does. It's a condensation of so many forces—political, cultural, ideological. So, thinking about that vessel as a moment where these things that move, and that our identities, our practices, our rituals, our cultural motifs are present, and they can find form in architecture by bringing different forces together on a physical level. But then, also, in terms of what that means as a method of practice. I'm really interested in that too. And, for example, when I worked on the Serpentine Pavilion... I guess this brings together both examples, because physically, the pavilion brought together so many different forms that I was influenced by. So, when I first started to work on the pavilion, I was really interested in places that became home for people when they first moved to London. So, some of the first mosques, churches, synagogues, but then also marketplaces, where people would be able to find traditional ingredients for recipes, or a cinema where someone could hear something in their mother tongue, some of the first venues to play Black music, and so on. And I worked with drawing and mapping these places of belonging, both from the archive and from places that I experienced and visited in London. I drew 52 of these places. Many of them have been erased, and it was also a kind of love letter to be able to model them architecturally. And then, the pavilion was an abstraction of these forms, and it became a gathering space—or a series of small gathering spaces at different scales—that brought together these forms. And architecturally, I wanted to be able to honor these as part of the archive. I wanted to honor these places that were so important to communities after they migrated. And that's what I'm talking about, in terms of formal resonance with migration. Of course, that's one example. In many of our other works, we look at architectural forms that have been important for different kinds of rituals and so on—perhaps more directly in other kinds of vernaculars and how we can work with them in a contemporary language.

But also, the other thing about the pavilion is that as much as I wanted to fold London into the pavilion, there was also a folding out of the pavilion into the city. And we placed fragments of the pavilion in community institutions that were important to the research. We worked on programming events with these institutions across the summer, and also beyond that. And for me, there was something in that method that is also migratory and diasporic. I was somehow trying to learn from these networks of cultural production that were so small, but that catalyzed so much—and also that worked across institution programmatically. And that logic, for me, was so important. I wanted to be able to learn from it as an architect. And expanding the pavilion in these fragments, or thinking about it as an archipelago architecturally, is also something that we learn from that is diasporic. What is the distinction between host and home? And how do we communicate and operate across sites?Just one more example. On a current project that I'm working on, which is a bridge in Belgium… So, the brief for the project was to create a pedestrian bridge that connects two sides of the town. And there's a river that separates them. So, there's a music festival that happens in the town and it's currently expanding across the river into this industrial zone. Again, we're talking about water. When we first started to look at this town, I thought that perhaps I'm not the right architect to work on it, because I don't know the Belgian architectural vernacular particularly well. And I thought that perhaps there are other architects who are competing who do. But the more that we started to look at it—because of that waterway and its position in relation to broader waterways—that town was industrial, because of its ability to also bring labor into that area.And of course, before World War I, it was one of the places that brought mass labor from the Congo. And through our research we found that the first person to study in Belgium from the Congo studied in this town, Vilvoorde. His name was Paul Panda Farnana, and he studied horticulture. He became an incredible scholar. He passed cum laude with distinction. He went on to work for the government. He planted all over the landscape of Belgium. And so on a physical level, he made a huge contribution to the country. And then, he was conscripted to the army and that experience turned him into an activist because, of course, he was treated with extreme discrimination. After that, he became an activist. He started to organize Pan-African conferences all over Europe with [W.E.B.] DuBois and several others. He also advocated for the wages of Black people to be more fair. He made a huge contribution and there's very little in the country that honors him or recognizes him; there's nothing on a physical level that does, and he's quite unknown in public discourse. So, we wanted to make our project an homage to him.

We started looking at water architectures from the Congo, and there are these beautiful carved boat structures. And when they're stacked up next to each other, they become places for people to trade in together. And we were very, very inspired by the sentiment. So, the bridge takes the form of a series of conjoined boats, and each of them is planted with species that come from Farnana’s research. And then, a little bit like the Serpentine Pavilion, there is the main bridge structure, but there are also smaller boat structures that will float along the river bank and pollinate new ecologies. And there I think, of course, that same logic of working kind of like a diaspora, with things that move and embed themselves. But also, here, we're extending that logic to ecology, to thinking about rewilding and healing a landscape that is very, very toxic. And for me, that of cours has so much resonance with so many of the curatorial work that you've done. I wonder if you wanted to touch on that?

NG:

Just by coincidence, and old friend of mine from Belgium happened to tell me, "There is this project for a bridge in this town in Belgium, and—"

SV:

Wow!

NG:

"—we're so lucky that Sumayya is going to do it, and I can't believe it. I'm so excited that it's her, because what she picks up and what she plants into our cultural sphere is just making us so conscious.” It was so beautiful. And she also just happens to be the same person who was significant for me when I was working in Belgium on the Contour Biennial, which is a threatened, small-scale biennial, soon to disappear, I believe. But again, it's just the synergy is really also a message to us that these projects and visions, that we do take up, are also primary ways of precisely holding together those spaces of knowledge, the kind of figures who have been oppressed, submerged, lost into these canons and museological domains. Or even within educational spaces, they are not remembered. So, what you are doing for that bridge, it's a message that reached me recently in this way, and it was very moving. And it made me think as well, how I was quite, initially, at a loss for inspiration when I was invited to this medieval town in Belgium, Mechelen. And first thing people said was, "It's a boring town. You can make a biennial there. I don't know if I'll come. We'll see."And it was just such an incredible experience, because like you said, there are stories and narratives for us to pick up on—these frequencies that may not be on the surface for many, many reasons of colonial violence, but also many other reasons that we keep learning along the way. So, in that sense, for me, it was the architecture of this old courthouse in the middle of Mechelen. It was meant to be this seat of justice for the European lowlands. And I sensed that its regimentation around justice was just really a tool to keep out of legal bounds a lot of other subjects and peoples who were not able to access that centralizing space of legal power. And so I also, in a very different way, went into archives within the Tervuren Museum, looking at forms of punishment that were met by Belgian administrators. And trying to think about being at the limits of justice—which I borrow from Denise Ferreira da Silva, who was an advisor to me. So, on one hand, thinking really, how do we artistically inform ourselves from the limits of justice? And again, thinking through forms of evidence, thinking about the court as a theater, looking at not just the fact that this was a place for legal consolidation for the European lowlands, but that it was also a place for music that was about polyphony.

And so, I kind of turned it around and I was like, "Okay. You also have polyphony in your music. It may not be in the space of law. We can respond to that. We can do a call-and-response and see what other voices need to filter in. What other polyphonies in history can be brought in?" I'm so excited for that bridge and the ways in which, again, it is a living architecture. But the fact that, as an architect, you remain so conscious and determined to create spaces of impermanence, which we have come to prior. But also of these sort of infrastructures in this case, which are about distribution and about ecologies within the city that may not otherwise thrive. And particularly, rewilding.

SB:

On the notion of rewilding, I'm reminded that you both have a relationship with Colombo. And Sumayya, you're working on a project at Lunuganga. Colombo is perhaps overabundant with narratives that are jostling and sometimes violently coexisting. So, perhaps you could speak more broadly to the wilding and taming of those resonances there?

SV:

Of course, I also just want to be conscious of my own terminology when we talk about what is wild and how we control the landscape. So, forgive me for any inconsistencies in my own language. Yeah, so, in Sri Lanka, a lot of my research has been just naturally looking at events related to resistance. I'm also just thinking about what Natasha is saying about courts and legal systems. Of course, that's something that's so present in all of our minds at the moment. For me, Nelson Mandela was released from prison 34 years ago this week, at a similar time that we've all been witnessing the case at the ICJ brought forward by South Africa. And I think, thinking about legal systems and their forms of performance is also something that we should all be thinking about in our work right now. So, thank you, Natasha.

So, in Colombo, a lot of the research that we've been looking at is related to plants and their forms of resistance, and also how they were used in local traditions to resist colonial ideologies. And we've been working on research for a series of small pavilions. How many of them we can realize in the short term is to be determined. But, for example, the first one is centered around the local suriya flower. And we were looking at these events in colonial times when Sri Lanka was under British colonial rule, where the sale of poppies… The proceeds went to British War veterans and soldiers. I think it's still something that's very symbolic right now in Britain.But, this was happening in Sri Lanka at the time. And local youth in schools in Sri Lanka felt that there was a disjuncture between those actions and the honoring of their local soldiers. So, what they did is they started to organize counter sales, and they sold local Sri Lankan poppies, or suriya flowers. And there was a kind of informal competition that took place between the sale of these British poppies and the sale of the Sri Lankan poppies. And the one pavilion that we're working with is really just a bed of suriya poppies. The other one—the research is centered around local instruments in Sri Lanka, and it's also inspired by the same youths, their schoolteachers as well. So, there are stories of the colonial cannon gun being sounded at 11:00 AM on school mornings by British administration. And schoolteachers in some of the local schools started to instruct the schoolchildren to play local music and instruments to drown out the sound of the colonial cannon gun. And so, the second pavilion is working to honor these sounds. And we've been looking at how to work with them as formwork for what we're casting.We've also been investigating construction materiality related to Sri Lankan grain stores. In conjunction with that, both of those ideas is really thinking about the role of the local and also the role of the landscape, in both control and in forms of resistance. And of course, there's so much to do with sound and with the way that a landscape is also orchestrated, so that sounds of control and domination can be heard from particular distances, that surveillance can happen from hills. And the landscape has, as we know, always been employed as a tool of control. But it also has, very beautifully, been worked with as a tool of resistance—often in very gentle ways as well. And there have been so many projects in Sri Lanka to do with planting, the planting of jackfruit trees. Also, there are so many movements to do with planting that are related to resistance.

SB:

Natasha, that opens up both Sri Lanka and your work on rights and resistance.

NG:

Yeah. Sri Lanka is one of my recently adopted homes that called onto me at the same time for a curatorial project, but also where I met my partner and moved to, seasonally. But, relate again so much to how you are thinking around landscape as a resistant space of building practices and orienting oneself into. But, also how it has been constantly shaped by imperial forces, also by militaristic forces, especially in this island. And for us, also, in terms of Colomboscope, which is the other hat I wear, directing this festival edition, which is called Way of the Forest. Again, one sort of relates very much to what is perhaps to come, and what the fantastic team at Lunuganga has been doing the last two years as well.

We sense so much of affinity in some of those processes, and really to think around terrestrial narratives from a very localized space of the plantation landscape, of land-owning versus land dispossession. I think these are very, very vital facets in an island like Sri Lanka, which has been a crossroad in the Indian Ocean, and yet a space of holding such trauma. So, at least for us, some of the recent projects have been thinking about intergenerational trauma in relation to very particular landscapes, forest spaces, wetland areas, lagoons in the island. And may I look forward to being in further exchange with you, hopefully, on your next visit also to Sri Lanka.

SB:

Absolutely. I can't help but think that this is going to be a generative conversation, whether that's in measurable forms of productivity, or maybe even more hopefully not measurable forms. It pains me to wrap this conversation, as it seems so fertile. But I just want to thank you both so much for your time. Natasha and Sumayya, thanks for joining us this morning and for being so generous in your exchange. It's been a pleasure.

SV:

Thank you so, so much. This was such a wonderful conversation and I'm so looking forward to more.

SB:

Alright. So, we hope you enjoyed that tender exchange between the architect Sumayya Vally and the writer and curator Natasha Ginwala. Of course, you can find more information on both speakers and the rest of the series in the show notes on the re:arc institute website and on the digital platform KoozArch. All episodes of the podcast, all equally insightful, can be found through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to yours. I'm Shumi Bose. You've been listening to Between Us, the second season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-Being podcast. Thank you so much for joining us and stay hopeful, happy, soft, and strong.

Cover featuring artwork curated by Natasha Ginwala (left) & artwork by Sumayya Vally (right)