speculating souths
What does a mud substrate have in common with a mycelium substrate? They are both ecosystems - void of the sterility of contemporary building materials.
They both evoke an architecture of architecture - a web of architectures both micro and macro, nested and nesting.
WHO ARE WE?
Rural Futurisms is a collective of writers, designers, cultural practitioners, a historian, and a climate activist imagining futures of rurality through Southern perspectives. Founded in 2023 by Lesego Bantsheng, the non-profit organisation is rooted in northern South Africa and is dedicated to decolonising the archive, building community agency, and addressing climate justice through design, storytelling, and situated practice.
We function as a slow organisation, intentionally taking on one or two projects each year to foster intensional entanglements with the communities we collaborate with. This allows us to build long-term relationships rather than time-bound outputs, and to situate our work in processes of listening, co-creation, and intergenerational dialogue.
Our practice engages with the material libraries and cosmologies of rural contexts, exploring how communities design their futures through material practices, oral histories, food systems, kinship structures, and experimentation. The outcomes of our projects range from platform archives, workshops, and participatory research to spatial interventions and experimental compositions with materials such as clay and mycelium co-created and imagined with rural custodians.
Rural Futurisms advances a lexicon of design by agency – positioning design not as product-driven but as a catalytic practice for reimagining rural life outside extractive paradigms. Our work considers multiple scales, from the body to cosmology, centring rural knowledge systems as foundations for equitable, ecological, and culturally grounded futures.
