ko pele (front)
Top (L-R):
Lesego Bantsheng,
Calvin Mokgalagadi,
Keabetswe Motaung,
Ruth Manda,
Mary Rancho,
Daniel Loato Mokgosi, and
Awande Buthelezi
Front (L-R): Mmamorena Maleho, Malebogo Boikanyo, Dineo Chere, Lesedi Mokalake, Kerileng Gloria Chose, Queen Diteho, Buisanyang Tau, and Karabo Moumakwe
Not Featured: Lesedi mokalake, Malebogo Boikanyo, Mamorena Maleho, Queen Diteho, Dineo Chere, K Lekgotla, TM Rancho, KF Gaorekwe, and KS Motaung
Front (L-R): Mmamorena Maleho, Malebogo Boikanyo, Dineo Chere, Lesedi Mokalake, Kerileng Gloria Chose, Queen Diteho, Buisanyang Tau, and Karabo Moumakwe
Not Featured: Lesedi mokalake, Malebogo Boikanyo, Mamorena Maleho, Queen Diteho, Dineo Chere, K Lekgotla, TM Rancho, KF Gaorekwe, and KS Motaung
01 on the RF project
Rural Futurisms is our pilot research project rooted in the rural South African villages of Disaneng and Makgobistad. This community-centered initiative is part of the South Designs constellation, supported by funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project seeks to investigate materials of making in rural environments and their intrinsic connection to the cosmologies of the people who inhabit them.
At its heart, Rural Futurisms explores how the communities of Makgobistad and Disaneng envision and design planetary futures by engaging with both traditional and contemporary design-making technologies. By fostering a dialogue between heritage practices and innovative approaches, the project highlights the transformative potential of rural creativity and its role in shaping sustainable futures.
02 on methods (informally)
Our exploration is channelled through the geography of home and discursive registers of family history as modes of meaning-making. We treated the village as an archive, searching through homes as files and memories as pages. We conceive of the home as constituted by an archive and museum of traditional bio and geo artefacts. It is also an anchoring point in a thread that navigates through lineage, and finds within the village, the artefacts valued in the existing hierarchy of a society. In our explorations in the village, we wondered and followed threads from family ties, depending on the fragile recollections of the old and those around them.
03 on participants
Members of the immediate and neighbouring communities of Makgobistad and Disaneng, predominantly Setswana-speaking, were invited to participate in interactive workshops and a mud-hut construction that marked the conclusion of our on-site investigation. We aimed to engage community members with invaluable cultural knowledge and skills, including craft makers, artists, artisans, traditional healers, spiritual practitioners, builders, elders, and youth. They became a primary source of cultural and traditional knowledge, providing the framework for our workshops and facilitating the exchange of insights between and within community participants and ourselves as researchers.
The workshops encouraged collaborative explorations of intuitive clay crafting, speculative material combinations through clay and mycelium, and traditional Setswana architectural techniques and space-making methods, which have been rendered fragile by modernity, climate change, and globalisation. Participants also contributed their expertise and physical efforts to the mud-hut construction, to which they become custodians of.
04 why this archive
This archive is assembled as a counter-current and underscored by a textual, visual, and sonic critique of inherently colonial discourses of knowledge-making and record-keeping. In our attempts to piece together, preserve, and amplify the ‘hidden transcripts’ of a society on the margins of national heritage and memory, we worked with rural craft-makers, recorded evanescent ch/oral histories, and constructed an experimental hut-lab-cum physical archive in order to preserve indigenous heritage using community-facing indigenous knowledge systems.
Coming soon