Miliswa Ndziba
Miliswa Ndziba is an architecture practitioner and researcher who was born on 27 October 1993 in Durban, South Africa. She matriculated from Pretoria High School for Girls in 2011, and completed her B.Sc. in Architecture from the University of Pretoria in 2018. She went on to complete her Bachelor of Architecture Honours and Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at the University of Johannesburg in 2020 and 2021, respectively. In 2022, she co-founded the architecture collective room19isaFactory, worked as unit assistant to Unit 19 at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), and participated in her first exhibition Situated Making at the FADA Gallery in 2022.
Miliswa approaches architecture as the practice of manifesting the fantasy of persons/people through space-making. Her interests lie in dismantling the continued construction and preservation of spatio-political utopias, through worldbuilding techniques such as Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Critical Fabulation’. Her practice of child-play-as-analogue-modelling redefines methodologies used in the field of geology - such as models and modelling, analogies, experimentations, simulations and spatial visualisations - as child-play. Through child-play-as-analogue-modelling she proposes ways of both mapping site and projecting alternate realities onto site at various scales, through child-play at the intimate scale.
Photo credit: Boitumelo Mazibuko