In my first year at the University of Pretoria, I was taught by Nico Botes. I was one of just a handful of people of colour. Although I have a very rich experience of growing up around textures and textiles, culture and rituals, I hadn’t studied art at school. Nico opened my mind to a whole new world. I particularly remember him screening films that were not just about  architecture but about everything; they enabled us to travel to places and worlds we could never have imagined possible. Nico also discussed such issues as what it means to be a South African and what it means to educate a new generation of architects.

At Wits [Witwatersrand], Hilton Judin was my professor in the first year of my master’s program. By then, I had developed a frustration with the architectural education canon and was aware that my work didn’t fit into what was expected. Hilton encouraged me to embrace my sensibility and celebrate it. For one of my projects, I was working on a set of columns that did not fit on a traditional grid; each was different. I tried to push it in a rather conventional direction.

At that moment, he looked at my earrings — which are quite expressive, as you can see. He told me that given that I like unique shapes instinctively, I could try to express my columns in gold. “Oh no, I would never do something so kitsch,” I said. But he said, “It doesn’t have to be. I really want you to start embracing how you design architecture in ways that are different.” Alluding to the way I was dressed, the kinds of things I was interested in and the references that I was bringing into my projects, he encouraged me to translate it all into architectural form. That moment had a very profound impact on me; I understood that architecture can be inspired by anything. And if we have different points of origin for how we design, inevitably that leads to forms that are different from what we already know. My own point of view could and should be celebrated.

Research never stops. A project could start with a conversation or information found in an archive. I am particularly inspired by stories, myths, even rumours — narratives about people who arrived in a completely new setting from their places of origin. For example, we won a competition to design a pedestrian bridge, the Asiat-Darse bridge in Vilvoorde, Belgium. At first, I didn’t feel like I had something to say about this place. But the more I researched, the more I discovered. It turns out that Vilvoorde, which benefited greatly from the Industrial Revolution, was one of the first places in Belgium that brought in labour from the Congo. That sparked my interest in migrant stories.

The first person who came to Vilvoorde from the Congo was Paul Panda Farnana, an agronomist who studied at the local horticultural school. He’s referred to as the first Congolese intellectual; he chronicled the era’s racism, advocated for change and took part in Pan-African Congresses in Europe. Yet his name is hardly mentioned in Belgium’s history books, even though he worked for the government and was conscripted into the Belgian army during World War I. We wanted to honour his life in our bridge design.

We researched Congo’s waterways and discovered these incredible dugout canoes from the Congo. When they are aligned, they become places for people to trade and gather. That’s how the bridge became a series of connected boat forms, each planted with species that Farnana researched. It then made the local news that Farnana will be included in the official Flemish Canon. This is exciting! The role of an architect is to be able to absorb, reflect and translate who we are. Buildings should reflect and affirm who we are. I use architecture to reveal stories that may not be visible at first.

Not from anywhere in particular. I am inspired by different architects, especially by those, like Zaha Hadid and Isamu Noguchi, who were driven by their own cultural experience. But as far as researching stories, in my case, that drive simply comes from Joburg, where another city lies underneath the surface of what’s visible. It is the city that was built very quickly when gold was discovered — and in forms that didn’t reflect its population. So now we have a city where  people’s lives and rituals are superimposed on those forms, which are appropriated in very interesting ways. It is those informal conditions that I am interested in most.

For a middle-class person, it’s possible to live in Johannesburg without encountering any difference; many of its people live isolated lives. But if you make an effort to peel back the surface, there is so much that’s waiting to be translated into form. I started my practice because I wanted to translate these phenomena of racial and economic disparities that I could see in the city. That’s why I like working on installations, not just architecture, which for me are ways to better understand the city.

I conducted research into places that don’t exist anymore, like the Four Aces Club and the Centerprise bookshop and community centre, both in Dalston, as well as the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill and other places important for cultural production where people found their home in London. I started with the Bishopsgate Library (now Institute) archive, where I looked for event posters, such as those for theatres run by Black women and other cultural events for migrant communities. Then I traced them back to their physical addresses. One thing led to another, and I discovered a whole network of these spaces, including the headquarters of the West Indian Gazette, which shut down in 1965. Many of these places did not survive gentrification.

To proceed with the pavilion’s actual design, I looked at present-day London and realized that the same phenomenon of displacement still exists. I walked the city’s neighbourhoods, documenting and photographing community spaces where people make their home. So what you see in the pavilion are abstractions of what I interpreted as gestures of generosity: seating surfaces, steps, archways, windowsills, fluted columns, cornices, canopies. There is no direct translation in the pavilion, but an amalgamation of all these gathering  structures.

The pop-up stations were based on the diasporic method, where a singular form comes apart and finds itself dislocated from the whole yet connected through various informal networks — a diasporic infrastructure.

The cork was reclaimed from the wine industry, the steel came from our contractor’s previous projects in York and the timber from a lumberyard of reclaimed stock. Each pop-up installation was a collaboration with a partner institution, like the Tabernacle in Notting Hill and the Becontree Forever in East London, which runs various community spaces.

That project builds on our work in the maqam, an Arabic word that translates as both the idea of coming together for a performance and a melodic scale in the form of singing. I was interested in the simplest iteration of architecture that gathers people, such as a call for prayer or a niche that points in the direction of Mecca. So we looked at a series of totems, such as ceremonial symbols, flagpoles and speaker systems on top of minarets. We researched these elements and how they convene gatherings, then collaborated with the artist Thania Petersen and the sound designer Sukanta Majumdar, who created a sound that crosses the continent and the diaspora. As these rituals travel and their ideas spread, they become hybridized with local cultures, languages and, ultimately, architecture. We will continue to create these installations, gatherings and performances beyond the life of the Biennale. We’re now planning one in Cape Town and another in Tunis.

Yes, and my future children. It is important to honour bodies of knowledge that, at some point, were stopped — they weren’t allowed to continue because of colonization, apartheid and other forces. I think that being able to learn from them, so they can evolve, is important. Because even when we look at so-called vernacular architecture, much of it appears to be frozen in time without having had opportunities to evolve. But there is so much to learn from the vernacular: Villages that may look very basic often prove that they incorporate incredibly sophisticated forms of community, respond to climate and weather, and work integrally with the planet. We need new models for what African architecture is or for what new architecture is. Contemporary architecture should absorb more traditional knowledge and be more hybrid.

In the letter, I describe some points of inspiration that come from Joburg. They are the ones that give the city life. They are the rituals of our city. I am part of the generation of architects that is thinking about who we are, how architecture can bring us together and how it can respond to all the challenges we are facing. The architects now coming of age want to build differently, and I hope to see a multitude of ways to express different experiences and attitudes to bring new and unique imaginations into the world.