Game-Changing Architecture Graduates #01 /// Kgaugelo Lekalakala

The Game-Changing Architecture Graduates project is a short daily series of posts that aim at honoring and giving visibility to the work of people who recently graduated from architecture school, and who fiercely engage with the political dimension of the built environment. Battling with “the discipline that organizes bodies in space” that tends to materialize and enforces the violence of colonial, racist, patriarchal, capitalist, and ableist political structures, they undertake to either beating architecture at its own game, or envisioning revolutionary designs and narratives. Please note that this series exists in a joyful and constructive spirit of community-building, far from ideas of competition, ranking, and exhaustiveness; there is no doubt that many other people than the ones featured in it would deserve to be part of it.

Read the series introduction /// Find the rest of the series

#01 Kgaugelo Lekalakala

City: Johannesburg
School: Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg.
Year graduated: 2019

Lekalakala Kgaugelo

Kgaugelo Lekalakala is a young architect, practitioner, local critic at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg South Africa, and artist from Mmametlhake, Mpumalanga, South Africa. Her work explores the Black female body in space, using paintings, graphics, and architecture to critique spatial constructs. Her studies at The National School of the Arts (2012) where she specialized in sculpting, ceramics, painting, and design, broadened her medium in Architecture. In 2016 she attained her bachelor’s degree at the University of Cape Town (BAS) and graduated at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (2019) with a MTech Arch (Prof) (CW). Her work has been published in City Journal: Tales of the Vulnerability of African Black Women in Transit Spaces. (April: 2020).

Project /// Tale of Women in Transit Spaces

The title of my work is called Tales of the Vulnerability of African Black women in Transit Spaces. It is centered on the concept of transit and transitional spaces as both real places of moving and as metaphorical spaces of journeys, transitions, and changes. It talks of a place we are from, and the place we move to — a continuous process of being in transit. It explores a series of narratives of transit. It takes the position of Black African women moving through space adopting the method of surrealist collages transformed into an architectural tactic to critique and expose issues of vulnerability Black female bodies encounter in transit spaces. These surrealist images explore how women traverse different spaces as they move from their domestic realm passing through taxi ranks, walkways and sidewalks that places them as object of male gaze, artefacts in space, which creates gendered power dynamic spaces in urban-rural landscapes.

This study is dear to me because I am from a village called Mmametlhake in Mpumalanga, South Africa, but throughout my childhood I was mostly at my grandmothers’ household at the nearby village called Seabe. Her home holds many tales of what growing up as a Black woman entailed. Her life was constantly ruled by the male heads, her father and, later, her husband. She would describe how she was a constant object in her home, tossed, broken, and ungrounded. The project further explored how these gendered dynamic spaces have filtered into the streets we walk through. Throughout my life I constantly navigate between rural and urban spaces (using public transport), moving from Bree Taxi Rank (Johannesburg, South Africa) to Bloed Taxi Rank (Pretoria, South Africa). Moving through rapidly growing dense passages in the inner city can be daunting as female. You cannot help but notice how fragmented these spaces are, to an extent where you are merely an object moving through space. Gloria Anzaldúa writes in her piece “Intimate Terrorist: Life in the Borderlands” (1987), how the world is not safe for women to live in:

“We shiver in separate cells, in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, the attacks in the streets. Shutting down.”

She also explains how a woman is unable to feel safe when her own culture is constantly critical of her and when the males of all races hunt her as prey. The female body is locked, immobilized, it cannot move forward, cannot move backwards. The use of surrealism as the theme for the work was essential as it allowed the work to stimulate the subconscious and expose reality. Suzanne Césaire surrealist writer and cultural theorist wrote of “Marvelous surrealism” (1943) as a mode of transcending the apparent and crushing colonial (Capitalist) real. For Césaire, as quoted by Thandi Loewenson and Thom Callan-Riley, “far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it” (Césaire, 1943). Following Césaire, surrealism is essential in this study as it creates temporary distance, not to dilute reality, but rather to strengthen the critique, allowing the audience to build a perspective for when they could engage with the reality again. Therefore, it reveals and exposes the absurd nature of the truth (Sindi: 2019) using particular characters, figures and situations.

When the female body travels between rural and urban landscapes, they are likely to be exposed to sexual assault in small passages or alleys around transport nodes they need to take when going home. This further leads to extensive spatial negotiations, compromises, and precautionary measures (wearing layered clothes, leaving work early to prevent being harassed at night) that limits woman’s ability to experience mobility as freedom. (Uteng 2011, 11). Some escape their patriarchal homes only to enter into transit spaces where she will still exist as an object or an artifact, where her body is a destination of every corner. Therefore, she is forever in transit, unsettled, and ungrounded. (Lekalakala, 2020)