Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

This paper draws on Felix Guattari’s concept of transversality and Karen Barad’s affective onto-epistemological ethics of relationality to explore transformative spatial diagramming in the Honors in Architecture program, University of the Free State, South Africa. The study is situated within a broader decolonization project and focuses on transversal visualization in two specific spaces on campus: the architectural learning environment and the built student residence environment.
The curriculum and pedagogy were questioned and reimagined to ethically acknowledge that students, facilitators, political constructs, and pedagogical spaces are relationally affected and assembled. This effort to transform ways of becoming-together in the learning environment led to a student design project that bid to transform an architectural environment on campus: a non-relational and territorial cluster of four existing student residences. Viewed as relationally assembled and affected by human and non-human components, this design project sought ways to creatively diagram, question, and decolonize the fixed impenetrability and homogenized insularity of institutional spatial design on the campus – a spatial design, we viewed as influenced by modernist and apartheid-era ideologies. The project aimed to discover new possibilities of becoming-together and communal living through the morphogenetic transformation of the residences into a network of permeable and connected spaces. The transformed architecture course opened possibilities of understanding deterritorialised, decolonized, and posthumanist subjectification processes, changing how we become, learn and design together. By understanding subjectivities as affective and relationally constructed, students and lecturers attempted to diagram ethical ways of becoming-together in pedagogical spaces, as well as physical spaces within campus institutions.