Open Lecture: Huda Tayob “Archival Imaginaries”

Urban Studies presents:
Huda Tayob “Archival Imaginaries”

February 18th, at 18:00-19:30, 4th floor open area A-400

This talk will focus on the co-curated online exhibition,  Archive of Forgetfulness – a pan-African digital exhibition and podcast series. This project is a space for interrogating the archival encounter, from the bodily and spoken, to the written and performed. As a collection of work centered on the African continent, the various contributors interrogate archival gestures, raise questions on personal and political histories that emerge through borders, and resurface forgotten conversations. In these works, archival labour and memory-work are understood simultaneously as deeply political, personal and speculative. The project opens up a space to question how an archival shift might open the space for pedagogical interventions and alternative ways of reading global urban environments. 

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and theorist, currently Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art. She has previously taught at the University of Manchester, the University of Cape Town, the Graduate School of Architecture (University of Johannesburg), and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She holds a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, awarded a RIBA Commendation for research, and undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Architecture from the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on minor, migrant, and subaltern architectures across the African continent and the global south. She is co-curator of the open-access curriculum Race, Space & Architecture and lead curator of the pan-African digital exhibition Archive of Forgetfulness. In 2023, she participated in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice with Index of Edges, tracing watery archives and coastal histories from Cape Town to Port Said.