Son[i]a #454

Mpho Matsipa (Johannesburg, 1983) is an architect, curator, and thinker whose work engages critically with Black urbanism and African mobility, seeking new tools and vocabularies to understand these mobilities as ordinary, creative, city-making practices rather than as crisis, death, or disorder. Attentive to what is said, felt, and often rendered invisible, she develops a practice that moves restlessly across disciplines.

Grounded in a Neo-Marxist education, her research offers a creative reimagining of the ties between resource extraction, geopolitics, and design through new vocabularies and strategies, including Black counter-cartographies and urban models rooted in spatial justice. She calls for more expansive conversations about architecture, modernism, and urbanism in Africa –ones that account not only for aesthetics, but also for colonialism, economics, displacement, ecological harm, and the erasure of Indigenous architectures and ways of living.

Through her inquiry and practice, art and curatorial work become tools for accessing the city (and its uses) differently. By attending to ubiquitous yet often undervalued spaces, such as the hair salon, as sites of survival and imagination in environments where one is not always welcome, she reveals how these spaces disrupt binaries such as center/periphery or formal/informal. Instead, they trace the complex trajectories of women’s lives, where new relations, forms of resistance, and futures can be imagined.

In this podcast, we talk about African mobilities, the uneasy legacies of modernism, racialized ecologies, and the extraction of Black time through regimes of waiting and migration. We also think with Mpho’s reading of Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe’s ‘distributed university,’ where museums, salons, and independent art spaces and networks become infrastructures for redistributing knowledge and resources beyond elite institutions. Above all, we return to the salon –as a space of intimacy, care, and beauty –as an infrastructure for imagining other futures.

With the support

_{Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.}