Architectures of the South: Bruising, Wounding, Healing, Remembering, Returning and Repairing

Architectures of the South questions what is at stake for architecture and spatial practice to contend with the south as an embodied site of knowledge and power. To critically and ethically engage with the south as temporal, geographic and epistemic terrain requires questioning practices, methodologies, forms of engagement and means of representations. It also necessitates a constant awareness of the relational and ‘radical instability of the meaning, location and history’ of the south as a term and location (Ananya Roy). Framed by the long-standing histories and practices of violence witnessed by the southern geographies of our home countries - Colombia for Catalina Mejia and South Africa for Huda Tayob - we invited contributors to respond to colonial and neo-colonial violences alongside practices of care and repair. In this issue, we ask how a return to thinking with bruising, wounding, remembering, returning and repairing, might enable a drawing out of relational, deep and long histories of displacement, racialised dispossession and extractive violences; while at the same time foregrounding the necessity of work that centres reparative practices as a move to imagining liveable lives.

‍Inviting contributions on Architectures to a journal of creative research is a provocation to move beyond our own disciplinary structures, and to maintain an insistence on the value of creative practices despite enduring violence (...) ‍The collection of nine creative projects made in response to the open call draw in a wide range of geographies, methods and practices around key concerns'