Bodies Beyond Representation
Nanchalee Waite
LoBa is a design and research duo set up by Thomas Kerr Bell and Nanchalee Waite after graduating from the MA Architecture programme at the Royal College of Art, London in 2025. During our time at the RCA we studied and practiced as architects, filmmakers and educators, the intersection of which is crucial to our practice. We worked on a number of successful projects together during our two years at the RCA and have continued working together since.
Our practice is grounded in process and site-based methods often employing moving image as an analytical tool capable of prompting reflection on questions of value and perception. An initial collaboration emerged through research into environmental toxicity and contested ecologies where we found traditional architectural representation struggled to communicate the complex temporalities and relations at stake across often imperceptible conditions.
Working with moving image allowed us to engage with a site while positioning space as something dynamic and constantly unfolding, produced but also placed under scrutiny by its means of capture. Since then film has become the foundation of our practice as a means to research, critique and construct alternative forms of spatial knowledge.
Our proposal focuses on sites and conditions that are challenging to represent, requiring innovative forms of documentation and perception. Previous projects have often worked at the edges, be that of land and water or more intimately, the border between bodies - the human body and/as bodies of water - and synthetic chemicals. We seek to explore the inter- and intra-activity that occurs at these sites and to give these processes modes of legibility beyond the routine re-presentation of data or conventional modes of visibility.
We seek to extend our work, to intersect with other practices and consider different temporalities, scales, rhythms and aesthetic modalities. Drawing on our architectural, creative and critical backgrounds, we aim to develop a body of work that combines moving image, innovative spatial mapping and visual experimentation, to explore and probe at different processes at stake. To take these developing methods and consider new complex sites, such as the coast line that surrounds us, might offer us reorientations of sensing and seeing, not least in this example through the experience of physical and perceptual distance from land-based modes of observation.
Ultimately our projects seek to offer surprising and poignant ways of sensing our present conditions anew and of (re)orientating ourselves within ecologically and politically sensitive territories.
