Bioart + Design Africa

VIAD

Imminent and Eminent Ecologies

Ndziba’s recent group exhibitions include Situated Making and SYM |BIO |ART at The University of Johannesburg FADA gallery in 2023. She is co-founder of the architecture bureau and digital platform room19isaFactory, which was invited to exhibit in the Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns group exhibition at the Foundation For Contemporary Art, in Ghana. Ndziba was also awarded a residency at Kudzanai Chiurai’s Library of Things We Forgot to Remember in 2023. She is co-founder of the ritual homeware and objects design studio What Has Two Eyes and Too Many Ears?, and a Research Associate in VIAD at the University of Johannesburg. 

General Artist Statement 

As a world-builder, I approach architecture as the practice of manifesting the fantasy of persons/people through space-making. My interests lie in dismantling the continued construction and preservation of spatio-political utopias, through world-building techniques such as what African American feminist writer, Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation”; child-play; and experimental modelling with non/living matter like mycelium. 

My bioart practice is a collaboration with scientists, engineers and other experts, where I draw on their technical knowledge to create my works. For me, this has blurred the boundaries between art, science and technology, and has become a powerful tool in the worldbuilding, mythmaking and projecting of alternate paradigms that form the core of my work. It has also helped me make better sense of the relationships between humans and biology. 

Because my practice is experimental and rooted in child-play, I am constantly uncovering new ways of seeing. It is incredibly exciting, as I am finding immense value and relevance of analogue modelling processes in storytelling, even within a digital age. Child-play-as-analogue-modelling is a worldbuilding practice, which means that it sits at the intersection of world design and storytelling. While I would not say that I have an art practice, I am intentional in creating an architectural practice that is accessible. I am making sense of what it means for my work, which is inherently a spatial enquiry, to be read alongside the work of artists. 

Artist Statement on the work on exhibition 

My project on the exhibition began with the findings of the archaeological research of the Slave Wrecks Project that used spatial inquiry methods to map the site and site conditions of the Sao Jose shipwreck on the ocean floor off the coast of Clifton Fourth Beach, Cape Town. While most of the wreckage of the ship had been lost to time, the archaeologists used historical archives to identify it from artefacts found on-site. I attempted to fill in gaps in the archive through child-play-as-analogue-modelling. I used this data as the starting point for my methodology of sand play and performance in order to visualise the conditions of the Sao Jose-Paquete de Africa shipwreck and its cargo of drowned Mozambican slave children. I then introduced mycelium – an analogue for algae found in the ocean – to the ecosystem I created. Through eutrophication, the remains of the drowned slave children transform through metaphoric materialism into an algal/mycelium bloom that, in turn, drifts from Cape Town to Mozambique, returning to end its journey with the colonisation of the Nossa Senhora de Baluarte chapel on the Island of Mozambique. In effect, then, my work is a bioart map-as-metaphor for a proposed fourth passage of the slave trade that takes the children back home to their final resting place in Mozambique. My work on the exhibition is the modelling of this process. 

The Chapel of Nossa de Baluarte is protected both from demolition and the natural process of decay, and is required by the Law of the Protection of the Mozambican Cultural Patrimony (Law No. 10/88) to be secured and maintained. The protection of this and other such colonial structures become part of colonialism's fortifying, territorialising and dispossessing paradigm. Thus, the colonisation of the ruin by algae, which is fantasised as it returns to the earth, dissolving, vanishing back into the landscape upon which it was placed, might also be a subversion of the mastery of nature agenda in western culture. 

My work challenges preservation laws, defying what it means to preserve colonial structures. I propose that the preservation of colonial structures is also the preservation of this colonial paradigm in which we still live. I thus make a case for the natural degradation of these buildings, where the buildings are transformed into generative landscapes, where they begin to melt back into the landscape, and then provide ground for alternate paradigms to be ushered in. 

Despite the fact that my work sits in fabulation, it provides avenues for real-life application, such as the use of alternative building materials to make an architecture that can melt back into the landscape. In addition to questioning what it means to make buildings, I also explore new ways of modelling spatial conditions, particularly those that are a result of natural events. As a design, my work also proposes a myth, owing to how it works together with existing social beliefs to produce alternate versions of reality (and the future) that are powerful enough to override the current present. I would like the audience to walk away with the knowledge that there are alternate worlds waiting to be revealed. 

 Extra

Read more on Miliswa Ndziba’s work on SYM | BIO | ART| here.