News from Nowhere
I am an architect and urbanist from London, currently working between Copenhagen and Berlin. I am a recent graduate from the Royal Danish Academy and hold an MA in Architecture: Urbanism and Societal Change, as well as a Bsc in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. My interest lies in the examination of the systemic and political impacts of spatial production - in both urban and rural contexts and in a variety of scales. My practice explores this through design on architectural, urban and systemic levels, and through design, research, mapping, and writing. I am interested in how storytelling informs spatial identities, and how these can be retold, subverted or transformed through the interdisciplinary practices of art, design, filmmaking, model building, photography, exhibition curation, as well as urban and policy planning.
Using the London's green belt as an example of an urban hinterland in dire need of redefinition, - this project reveals the significant influence of urban hinterlands on the systemic transformation of cities.
Rather than a pure figure of green countryside, the Green Belt is a complex space of extraction, exclusion and neglect. This project rejects the idea that the Green Belt can be ‘saved’ or reverted to a former or future more natural state. Instead, it embraces the possibilities and contradictions it holds as a third landscape - the remnants existing between pristine nature and the anthropogenic landscapes of the urbanised world. Made up of extractive scars, sprawling industries, tangled mobility networks and fragmented natural and public spaces - there is still opportunity for a reimagination of this territory. Using the River Colne as a site, the landscape is situated between the material and pictoral, within which the river zone is reconfigured as common territory. Through a reading of the landscape, the project incrementally connects, makes accessible and frames punctual moments along the river. Here, the entanglement of a plurality of spaces and actors is unfolded through negotiation, co-existence and parasitic grafting. By choreographing experiences of wonder, surprise and contradiction, the story of this complex landscape is retold. Not as a memorialisation of relics frozen in time, but instead as an anthropocentric ruin landscape which marks its past,- whilst also transitioning from a space of extraction, exclusion and neglect, into a space of seeding, inclusion and care. This project takes you on a journey through a riverscape in transition.
The project so far has unfolded as GIS spatial/speculative mapping, image making as film sequences, model building, and a research paper. It could evolve further as an exhibition, film or expanded research project, and lends itself to a variety of interdisciplinary discussions/practices.