MMA Design Studio

Researchers point out that vast landscapes devoid of human settlement, seen by tourists as representing the ‘real Africa’ in a pristine, ‘natural’ state, are nothing of the kind.
In 2019, using new LiDAR scanning technology, Professor Karim Sadr of the Department of Archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand was able to confirm the existence of a major Tswana settlement dating back to the fifteenth century in what is now the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve in South Africa.
Origins, an installation for The Laboratory of the Future, is inspired by this layered historical landscape and by an interest in architecture that explores our relationship to an animist world.
Architecture’s relationship to time is a dangerous liaison of its own. To survive the future, we need to retrace our steps back to a more ancient future, a future that reintegrates us within a living world of ‘other’ beings, animate and inanimate.

Authorial collaborators
Karim Sadr, Department of Archaeology University of the Witwatersrand
Technical collaborators
Moving Into Dance Mophatong, Black Roots Pictures (Zola Maseko), Stephen Banhegyi
Team
Bonolo Masango, Lwandile Maki, Malethola Chaka