Creative Talk: Watery Architectures

This event is part of our Creative Talks series that feature practitioners/makers/artists who work in a variety of disciplines, media and forms across the creative arts, including: the visual arts, design, performance, craft-work, creative writing and more. The series aims to address questions about the nature of ‘creativity’ and ‘practice as research’, featuring speakers who will share their work, the processes they use, their influences, and their own experiences of professional practice. Sessions will reflect the disciplinary range of speakers and may feature presentations, performances, workshops etc. The aim is to create an open, multi-disciplinary space in which to introduce audiences (students and the public alike) to a wide range of creative practices that inspire new ideas about how to make new work.   

For this Creative Talk we welcome Dr Huda Tayob who will share her experience as an Architectural Historian and her ongoing work on the project Index of Edges. The project, which was part of Venice’s biennale in 2023, draws on the vast global worlds of encounter along east African coastal cities to draw deep historical knowledge of living with and along the sea. 

Coastal and port cities and towns inhabit edge conditions, always engaging with the interior and watery worlds beyond. The curatorial and research project, Index of Edges, traces the vast global worlds of encounter along the east African coasts from Cape Town, South Africa to Port Said, Egypt to question the imaginary potential of architectural knowledge and archival resources. The project asks how architecture might learn from ways of living, inhabiting and residing in watery environments, through deep and submerged pasts. Importantly, architecture here is understood as a way of imagining and inhabiting the world—a series of world-making practices with varied beings and bodies, sites, and oceanic territories. 

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and is currently a senior research tutor at the Royal College of Arts, having previously taught at the University of Cape Town, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures focused on the African continent. She is co-curator of the open-access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and the digital pan-African platform, Archive of Forgetfulness (archiveofforgetfulness.com). She is a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives along east African coasts Cape Town to Port Said. 

Chair: Dr Sana Murrani, Associate Professor Spatial Practice, University of Plymouth 

Date: Thursday 7 November 2024
Time: 16:30 – 18:00
Venue: The House stage
Ticket information: £6, £4 concessions, free to University of Plymouth students