a space for trading
ideas, maps, images, technologies and data

spaceKIOSK is an architecture and research studio born on the African continent, working at the intersection of design, technology and trade. Using constructed works, drawing, exhibitions and writing, the studio explores spatial emergences and new imaginaries of economy and power.

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In March 2024, Sarah de Villiers and Naadira Patel opened ‘Assembling Lines’, a piece on exhibit at Spier Light Art 2024. The project presents a reflection on processes of extraction, production, distribution and trade, in a time when conversations on sustainable practices are at risk of being sidelined as abstractions.

Assembling Lines is engaged through a series of built infrastructural elements that translate extended production lines and apparatuses, drawing attention to forms of mass-production, consumption, automation, global flows of commodities, and the interconnectedness of colonialism, modern-day slavery, and a military industrial complex.

Image Heist

Recently, in June—July 2023, we have been researching and dreaming collaboratively, as part of IMAGE HEIST, a Unit lead by Manijeh Verghese and Sarah de Villiers within the Biennale College Architettura, La Biennale di Venezia. The work was explored with a group of seven international participants, from Johannesburg, Mexico City, Tibilisi, Rabat/Paris and Cairo. See the participants’ website here.

Laboratory of the Future

Sarah de Villiers participated in a team to provide curatorial assistance and management within the curatorial team for the Force Majeure section of The Laboratory of the Future, led by its Artistic Director, Lesley Lokko. The work featured 16 architects from the African continent, or in its diaspora, across the Central Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: ‘Edgar’s Sheds’, by Sean Canty Studio, La Biennale di Venezia, 2023. Visit labiennaledivenezia.org for more information on the exhibitions.

Archive of Forgetfulness

Development of research drawings and organisational graphic concept for an online exhibition and website archive collating 40 contributing responses on archive and memory, in Africa. Project curated by Dr Huda Tayob and Bongani Kona, and supported by the Goethe Institut. Visit the project here.

Dialogues with Dust

Dialogues with Dust consists of a series of curated online and offline talks, seminars, atmospheric reconstructions, concert-lectures and films interspersed with reading groups and drawing workshops. This series of dialogues raises issues and phenomena relevant to Egypt, Namibia, Johannesburg; and their hauntings, dust, spectres, edge conditions, ancient deserts and contemporary global catastrophes. The wide-spread of Covid-19 alerted us to the unavoidable planetarity of our current moment, asking us to reflect on our entanglements and impact on health, territory and climate. Through the notion of dust, we also contemplate phenomena long since dormant, against those ruptured, urgent and insurgent into atmospheres we inhabit. This marathon engages with a wide range of practices and ways of thinking and making architecture, place, and the world. Dialogues with Dust was organised by Unit 18 (Sarah de Villiers and Huda Tayob) and Unit 13 (Claudia Morgado and Eric Wright) at the GSA, and had contributions by 25 speakers and performers, including from Thandi Loewenson, Lori A. Brown, Sara Salem, Joseph Grima and Paulo Tavares. See episodes here.

Spatial Claims: Erven and Other Hyperreal Constructions of Value

Virtual installation that questions colonial representations of land, surface and land values based on research in Bree Street, Johannesburg and the entrepreneurial practices of Ethiopian shop occupants. Produced for Disembodied Territories, a project by Dr Sara Salem and Dr Menna Agha.

Addis Ababa Genocide Memorial

Design for a new museum comissioned by the African Union to record and acknowledge the atrocities of human genocide and other various violences, particularly in the African context. The site is on a former prison, which sits just opposite the African Union headquarters building. Work produced in 2015 through Mashabane Rose Associates.