‘Link in Bio’ is born out of the creative tapestry of Unit 5, Image Heist at the Biennale College Architettura, hosted by La Biennale di Venezia 2023.
It is a harmonious extension of the Instagram Archive. 'Link in Bio' unfurls as a digital tableau, intricately woven with threads of imagination and innovation. Here, the visions crafted by Unit 5 resonate, reverberating with the soul of the Biennale's architectural journey.
Unit Brief
Venice is a city that has been imaged countless times across its long history, across vast distances, and also reproduced at speed. These images became reference points for the creation of other cities, neighbourhoods and spaces; not reproduced exactly, but approximated and interpreted to create versions of Venice in London, Suzhou, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and beyond. But Venice itself, as a city of islands, was originally thought to have been founded by refugees fleeing the German and Hun invasions of nearby Roman cities, and bringing with them their ideas and images to create a new home. So, while Venice is a city constructed in the image of many other places, Venice in turn exists in replication. As philosopher Susan Sontag writes, images are agents of power that can work in contradictory ways. While they may contain and confine subjects within their frame, in other instances they give those who might have otherwise been precarious or placeless a “perceived home” within the depth of their composition. Images can also introduce a kind of vulnerability to a subject, since the image displaces it into a flat, replicable, transferable thing, that can be consumed and fleeting. But images may also extend time or render fantastic futures into their hold. They are settling and unsettling things ― we see all these as political acts. We take on the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale as imaging devices that transport us to other territories and back again to Venice. We will look at texts, maps, materials, and rituals as imaging tools of state and place, interrogating how they have been used in the past while inventing what their role might be today and in the future. Instead of the singular image, we will expand on what it means to image as an act. We will work with speed and the agency of different media, social media networks, materials, surfaces and spaces to question how more expanded ways of seeing can inspire new ways of working.
Tutors
Manijeh Verghese
Tutors
Manijeh Verghese is a designer and curator. She was co-curator of The Garden of Privatised Delights – the British Pavilion at the 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale and was the interpretation specialist for the new South Asia Gallery for the Manchester Museum in partnership with the British Museum that was co-curated by a collective of over 30 local experts. She is the Head of Public Engagement at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, where she organises lectures, exhibitions and other special projects for a range of audiences. She also co-leads the design studio Diploma Unit 12 and is a member of the Senior Management Team at the AA. She is currently one of the Mayor of London’s Design Advocates, an External Examiner at Cambridge University and a member of the Festival Committee steering group for London Festival of Architecture.
Sarah de Villers
Sarah de Villiers is an architectural researcher and designer, based in Johannesburg and Milan. Her work involves collaboration with design research institutions and practices, most recently through the African Futures Institute, as an educator within Unit 18 and Unit 14 at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (GSA); and as research-illustrator within the Archive of Forgetfulness. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand. She also runs spaceKIOSK, an architecture and research studio working at the intersection of design, technology and trade. Using constructed works, drawing, exhibitions and writing, the studio explores and documents spatialisations of economy and power. Sarah has been an associate at the AFI since 202
Participants
Catalina Garcia
Catalina García is a Mexican architect based in Mexico City, she finished her bachelor's degree at the Faculty of Architecture at UNAM , she took the special seminar Estudio Rx along with architects Gabriela Carillo and Loreta Castro being the first of her generation to graduate, together with her partner were selected for the BIAU XII Iberoamerican Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism for their undergraduate thesis project. She was part of the Latin America CLEA representative group at EASA ( European Architecture Student Assembly) in Sheffield, UK. In 2020 she participated in the "Water Device" Winter workshop in collaboration UNAM + University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Her research focuses on geological and social vulnerability in communities far from the urbanization of Mexico City, this research of almost 2 years was derived from her interest in the investigation of social phenomena and their impact on architecture and urbanism, competing in different occasions in projects for the government of MexicoCity such as the competition women in the territory for the category urban intervention in collaboration with Lizeth Rios + Mariana Villafán. After being part of the BCA her research took a turn of perspective exploring the idea of introspective human bodies and closer relationships no longer on a territorial scale but on a more personal scale.
Muhamad El-Fouly
Muhamad El-Fouly is an architect by profession, a self-taught designer and a voluntary researcher. He prefers to go around by Fouly for short, and for the derealization of world-familiarity with his first name. His field of interest is sustainability as a daily life practice beyond technology and UN guidelines. As well as sustainability in the context of living in and shaping one’s environment. Born in 1994 and a native of Cairo - Egypt, Fouly is currently based in Hamburg - Germany(since 2022) pursuing a master’s degree in Resource Efficiency in Architecture and Planning (M.Sc) at HafenCity University. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Architecture and Urban Planning (B.Sc) from the German University in Cairo in 2017, he has worked as an architect, interior and urban designer, as a design officer at his family workshop and most recently, as a multidisciplinary designer for a Dubai-based structural design firm specialized in value engineering, utilizing machine learning and AI for structure optimization and cost-and-time saving measures. His current obsession revolves around the NEOM project, part of which was investigated at the Biennale College Architecture 2023 at the Saudi Pavilion. In 2022, he was awarded the "Study Scholarship - Postgraduate Studies in the Field of Architecture 2022-2024." He also serves as an elected member of the REAP FSR student body for the academic year 2022-2023. During his free time, fouly enjoys watching sports, films, and series, reading, listening to music in languages he doesn't understand, organizing movie nights, playing table tennis, walking, sitting in the sun if the Hamburg weather allows and, most recently, taking up jogging.
Laila Ouzzine
Laila Ouzzine is a Moroccan scenographer based in Paris. She always knew design was made for her. When she was younger, she used to change the whole room setting just to make it special. She started her architecture studies at the International University of Rabat, Morocco. She moved to Paris for her Master in Architecture in Ensa Paris La Villette and went to Ecole Conte to finish her master in Scenography. During her studies, her reflections were vast. She's very sensitive to nature and connected to her surroundings. She likes to play with her senses. Laila is passionate about cooking, traveling and crafts. She likes to recycle and use natural materials to respect the environment. She's currently learning more about transitory design as she likes to design ephemeral architecture. It is a way to bring poetry to the city and gracefully weave the impermanence of existence into tangible form.
Lele Ramphele
Lele Ramphele is an architectural designer and researcher that uses relatively accessible architectural and photographic tools as well as short format fictional and non-fictional story telling to coax a more inclusive reading of both personal and collective everyday histories. In this story finding and telling he looks for generative value in the seemingly banal repetitive gestures to the obscure and reclusive material culture, intangible culture and felt experience- both personal and found experience. Experiences and stories tend to sit in a critical framework set by references such as affect theory as it’s elaborated on by Sara Ahmed and the necropolitics of Achille Mbembe. All work is done in the hopes for a more inclusive futuring of life and habitation. With his two siblings he has co-founded a space for these explorations called, m’lk collective. Lele has his undergrad from the University of Cape Town and his Master’s from Politecnico di Milano where he graduated with cum laude, he received architectural training in practice from Wolff Architects, Cape Town and ASPJ, Mexico City. Lele is currently working at Kate Otten Architects in Johannesburg. He has also spent a brief period of time in the film industry as a set designer on the film, The Women King.
Nana Zaalishvili
Nana Zaalishvili (1988) Born and based in Tbilisi, Nana Zaalishvili completed her Master's degree in civil architecture at Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. In 2016, she founded studio Idaaf Architects. Since its foundation, the studio has worked on multidisciplinary projects of different types and scale in Georgia and elsewhere. Nana's approach is shaped by Tbilisi's eclectic architecture and its hectic urban scene, as well as the stunning natural beauty of the Georgian vernacular architecture. Nana is also author of the book: Soviet Bus Stops in Georgia. All her works are available here: www.Idaafarchitects.com
Nobuhle Ngulube
Nobuhle Ngulube is a South African architectural designer and researcher. She is currently a Masters student at the Graduate School of Architecture in South Africa where she is part of Unit 7, City Dreams- Speculative and (im)probable; a unit focused on African urbanism and developing a new conceptual framework for thinking, writing and engaging with our cities.
Her research seeks to use the concept of “childing”, the carefree, joyful, and pleasurable exercise of play and the ability to negotiate uncertainty and instability within space (usually applying to children in their developmental stage) and tactics of play as an important design tool to speculate a future metropolis and means of generating new architectures by developing adaptable spatial responses that support well-being. This is because the play of children is quite dynamic in its nature and sees no obstacles or boundaries in its working but rather incorporates all that is in its path and builds on existing possibilities. This open-ended and dynamic approach with its ability to negotiate and inhabit uncertain conditions becomes especially significant in contexts of constant change and instability that characterize many urban areas in Johannesburg, South Africa. She speculates if acts of play and childing were used as design generators, could we come up with new tools and ways of intervening architecturally in the conditions of what Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe call “ceaseless metamorphosis” in the book Elusive Metropolis that characterize Johannesburg? In the process, would new spatial responses that better suited our context arise, and could we restore fluidity, delight, joy, wonder, pleasure, and freedom to the core of our urban design responses?
Zakiyyah Haffejee
Zakiyyah Haffejee is a South African born, London based architectural designer and researcher. She holds an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Johannesburg and an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art. In 2021, Zakiyyah moved to London where she joined the RCA ADS2 cohort - Worlding within the ruins of Racial Capitalism. Within ADS2, her work focused on the gold mining dumps of Johannesburg and their effects on the black and brown communities that live on the fringes. In her second year with ADS8 “Anatomies of Ecological Bodies – Assemblages of Coloniser and Colonised”; her work within the studio explored the hybrid identities of the Indian diaspora in South Africa using textiles as a medium. Her inquiry focused on an indigenous South African textile; known locally as isiShweShwe. isiShweShwe is an indigo-dyed blueprint textile that originated in Asia, it was absorbed and adapted by the West and travelled across oceans reaching the shores of Africa long before its’ craftsmen. Prior to joining the RCA, Zakiyyah contributed at Johannesburg-based practice, Counterspace Studio and later moved on to work for TakeAway Spaces, a start-up which aimed to provide low-cost alternate housing solutions in South Africa and the Archive of Forgetfulness. Zakiyyahs’ work often draws on themes of gender, identity and spirituality; focusing on rituals and uncovering meaning through language, history and religion.