Thandi Loewenson (b.1989, Harare)  is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations.

Thandi holds a PhD in Architectural Design from The Bartlett, UCL, through which she developed a form of architectural practice – weird and tender – to excavate and contest the extractive agendas driving the urban development of Lusaka. Central to this research was a live project, investigating how insertions of the other worldly and the downright weird – inspired by the Zambian Space Program – could support the City Council and the Chunga Waste Recycler’s Association to produce a ‘Weird-Tender’ recognizing them as partners of the state.

Thandi is a Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art. She is a co-foundress of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE – an ‘act of creative solidarity’ which ‘resists definition with intent’ – formed at The Bartlett in 2018 to oppose the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality and the myriad frontiers of oppression present in architectural education and practice today. Thandi is also a contributor to EQUINET, the Regional Network on Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa, a co-foundress of the Fiction, Feeling, Frame research collective at the Royal College of Art, and a co-curator, with Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, of the open-access curriculum project Race, Space & Architecture.

Selected recent work:

2024

BLACKLIGHT, Royal Institute of British Architects

Large format graphite drawing and essay.

Blacklight unearths stories of extraction, exploitation and racialisation which underlie the visible layers of the Jarvis Hall mural at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the construction of the world it supported. Thandi Loewenson, assisted by Zhongshan Zou, revisits the scene of an early colonial mine in Kabwe, Zambia, formerly known as Broken Hill. Located in Southern Africa, Broken Hill was a key site of resources in the colonial period, exploited for its lead and zinc deposits discovered in 1902. As a result, it is one of the most toxic sites in the world today. Thandi overlays the Jarvis Hall mural with a drawing from the same period as the construction of 66 Portland, depicting Broken Hill Mine after the discovery of the Homo Rhodesiensis skull by mine workers in 1921. Revisiting the drawing to reflect on the conditions of the site today, Thandi investigates the legacies and complicities of the RIBA in constructing architectures and subjectivities that facilitate ecological and social death. Thandi uses graphite as both drawing medium and surface, entering into a material dialogue with the elusive, reflective quality, and shine of working in and with the earth. In Kabwe and in graphite, somehow the hardest, darkest moments are also those most full of light. Read the Guardian review here.

2023

The Uhuru Catalogues, Central Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia 2023

Awarded Special Mention by the international Jury of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition ‘for a militant research practice that materializes spatial histories of land struggles, extraction, and liberation through the medium of graphite and speculative writing as design tools.’

African liberation movements are indelibly tied to questions of the land: who may work the earth, to what end, and under what conditions? Such foci betray the true nature of the African struggle today: taking place on the ground within the thickness of eroding topsoil, down the mineshaft where rare earths glimmer in the dark and, simultaneously, within the ozone. Across a series of composite graphite panels and an accompanying film, the Uhuru Catalogues stitch together entangled sites through which African liberation must be sought. In this installation, graphite is put to use as a conduit, a charged medium, that aims to energise a consciousness of the conjoined terrains of earth and air in movements for climate justice and equitable futures for all, on the continent and beyond.

Mhondoro Marauders: experiments in Space from Harare, Mhangura, Mazowe, Watamu and London

feat. Mhoze Chikowero, Shadreck Chirikure, Thandiwe Gula-Ndebele, Thando Mlambo, Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Divya Patel

Mhondoro Marauders explores questions of what constitutes the “digital” in African Space Programmes; expanding these beyond normative infrastructures and technologies of outer space to include a multitude of practices, portals, sonic tricks and bluffs through which space and time are understood, restructured and reconstituted to emancipatory ends. The project unfolds through multiple encounters—productive frictions and generous collaborations—which land in Harare, Mhangura, Mazowe, Watamu and London and travel through sounds, satellites, mediumship and conjuring, interpolations and samples. This is fugitive work, born out of necessity and cheekiness, marauding the cloud and airwaves for latent, unspent energy that remains to be ignited from liberatory movements seemingly gone by. This is also spirit work, channelling the figure of the mhondoro—shapeshifting and encoded within a non-Cartesian logic of space and time—a practice which Mhoze Chikowero, of the contributors to this project, identifies as terrifying the colonial imaginary.

Thandi hosts the Mhondoro Marauders Show which traverses through Chimurenga music, grime, bira ceremonies, guerilla communications, Earth Stations and more to explore the “technics” (Simone, 2021), manoeuvres, thieving and whisper networks through which sound extends the project of African liberation into atmospheric registers; spaces that are both intimately connected to land whilst simultaneously in and above the earth too. How does engaging these sites and strategies within the rubric of the “digital” make our worlds larger, now?

Ye Olde Performance, an audience with The Horrid Sisters, AGM 2023, Somerset House

A three-act live performance by Rosa-Johan Uddoh with collaborators Shola von Reinhold and Thandi Loewenson.

"Nothing is Impossible in Zimbabwe", Thandi Loewenson, ASAP/Journal, Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 8 no. 2, 2023, p. 240-244.

2022

Chitekete and Other Love Songs, Soundcloud

Shadreck Chirikure draws our attention to the Shona proverb, passed on generation to generation, and popularised and broadcast by Oliver Mtukudzi on the track Rirongere, 'kare haagari ari kare' (the past does not remain the same) resonating on the same frequency when Christina Sharpe writes of ‘the wake’ where, '...the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.' In both, there is an understanding of an inherent instability in the conception of Black time, where chiro nechiro chinenguva yacho(everything has its time), now and again. 'Chitekete and Other Love Songs', a short journey between three time signatures across Zimbabwe, Zambia and the DRC, investigates this condition through three genres of music – Sungura, Sembene and Zamrock – examining their sonic, spatial and material qualities as conduits of time travel and vehicles of ‘rupture’ (Sharpe).

& film screened at Nottingham Contemporary ‘After Growth: A Symposium on Post-Capitalist Imaginaries’, 19 March 2022

2021

Whisper Network Intelsat 502, Transmediale, Almanac for Refusal, 21 December 2021

Whisper Network Intelsat 502 traces a short history of infrastructures of speech - the possibility of speaking out, and speaking freely - in the Mazowe Valley, Mashonaland, Zimbabwe. A pair of lungs expand to their fullest capacity, drawing in air and tiny fragments of gold and dust, and then returning them to the atmosphere holding a whisper. Over and over, a telegraph line of voices carries through the bush, echoing into orbit and landing back on Earth. Touching on technofossils, a satellite now in a graveyard orbit and the communications strategies of bygone freedom fighters, and grounded by an Earth Station and a pair of postage stamps, this film explores legacies of black secret technologies - and Black Space technologies - of resistance in Zimbabwe.

‘On ether: attuning to black struggle in and of the air’ : film-in-progress, and discussion with Anand Pandian, Jane Bennett andJohns Hopkins Ecological Design Collective, 8 August 2021

‘To get lost in mysterious mist’, Survivance, e-flux Architecture

RELAY: a 24-hour durational conversation, a ritual in circumferential publicness, a performance becoming telegraph, current, message. Co-curated with Adam Kaasa and David Burns, 16-17 July, Biennale Architettura 2021.

Towards a material language of drawing — and drawing out — violence. Commissioned artwork. The Funambulist 37 (September-October 2021) Against Genocide guest edited by Zoé Samudzi.

‘along his path, the sky!’, PROPS 35, 25 June 2021

‘Lumumba in Space: African Space Programs and the Project of Liberation’, Graham Foundation Grantee, May 2021

‘As long as we are resisting we are free”: Co-curator, with Dubravka Sekulić, of the 'Co-Liberation’ International Lecture Series at the Royal College of Art, 2020-2021

CCA Mellon Researcher, Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Project, The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality, March 2021

‘Black Flight’, an architectural inquiry. Visiting Azreali Critic, Carleton University Canada, March - May, 2021

‘To make something happen’. On Black Flight: A Tribe Called Quest and Edward Festus Mukuka Nkoloso, performance for Archive of Forgetfulness podcast, January 2021

‘Ghost Publication Series’: Launch of a publication house with Huda Tayob and featuring work by Sara Salem for Race, Space & Architecture, January 2021

2020

‘A Taxonomy of Flight’, Commissioned film, The shape of a circle in the mind of a fish, Serpentine Galleries, December 2020

(and later screened at the Black Atlantic ‘Sensing the Planet Symposium’, Dartington Trust, 27-31 October, 2021)

Honourable mention, Princeton | Places Urban Imagination Prize, November 2020

‘UNBUILDING: a project which attends to the wealth of knowledge held in the moment when eyes catch, in lived, bodily experience, in intakes of breath and in ambitions for alternative presents’, co-curated with Miranda Critchley and David Roberts, BREAK//LINE, August 2020

‘An encounter with King Zhou’s pyramid': Equal parts fanfic, research log, and view from the passenger seat of a Toyota Spacio. Commissioned text for PiraMMMida, curated by Denis Maksimov, Masha Mileeva, Michał Murawski & David Roberts. July 2020

Race, Space & Architecture, with Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, July 2020.

‘Dust FM: A Guide to (Static) Mixtape Assembly’, Performance with David Roberts, Cairo, Harare, London and Johannesburg via zoom, April 2020.

2019

‘Never Look at the Sun’, Commissioned writing for Baloji, nowness, September 2019.

A Weird-Tender, Tender submitted to Lusaka City Council, collaboratively produced with Acting Director of Public Health for Lusaka City Council, Edgar Mulwanda, and the Chunga Waste Recycler’s Association, 2019.

Daring to Dream with Eyes Wide Open: review of Baloji’s Zombies, Review of African Political Economy, 2019.

‘In Permanent Readiness for the Marvelous’, co-edited with Thom Callan-Riley (2019), with and after Suzanne Césaire (1941).

‘Confessionals’, Group Performance, The Bartlett School of Architecture, 2019.

2018

‘Deportation Discs: a public hearing’, Curated exhibition in collaboration with Luke de Noronha and Miranda Critchley, The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, 2018.

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