SUMAYYA VALLY, ‘ARCHITECT, AFRICAN, MUSLIM and WOMAN’, on the power of hybridity.

Photographer Lily Bertrand-Webb

TIME100 Next List honouree, youngest architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion, artistic director of the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Sumayya Vally shares her thoughts on the only few things that matters: purpose, belief and art.

Celebrating hybrid identities appears to be the purpose of most of your work - if not all - as an architect, curator, artistic director, and principal of design research practice Counterspace. How has your individual path led to this vocation?

Ultimately, I think the very conditions and the cultures that we live in are hybrid. My own identity is so hyphenated, that it combines so much, just in who I am - African, Muslim, woman. And I think that is a strength and a power, because what hybridity does is, it allows us to resonate with many different contexts and allows us to empathize and see humanity in everyone else. There is also less of a risk of othering when we acknowledge and embrace our hybridity.

I was born and raised in an Apartheid-designated Indian-only township called Laudium, in South Africa. I was reared in a close-knit community, where faith-based practice and community initiatives played an important role in daily life, special events and activist activities.

I was born in February 1990, just four days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison; and I was four years old when the democracy we fought into being was born. 

I grew up in an incredible time of South Africa’s optimism, brought into a world in which Archbishop Tutu coined the Rainbow Nation and in the spirit of Ubuntu which translates to “I am because you are”. I was not quite of the ‘born-free’ generation; but very much raised on the cusp of it. 

I vividly remember parts of my childhood in inner-city Johannesburg, where my grandfather was a store-owner. In this world, I was surrounded by patterns and textiles–the Grammar, Punctuation and Rhythm of Agaseke, Bolga and Kente, tongues from Lesotho to India and Istanbul. On my daily walks to the Johannesburg City Library, I witnessed the surface, and glimpses of the workings inner-city–in the choreography of Fordsburg on a Friday before, during and after prayer time, the right time to buy fresh bread, whilst being made in stalls on a city sidewalk, the  systematic and instantaneous disassembly of these stalls at 6pm, and the performance of Johannesburg. Light on the streets and the skyline.

When I studied Architecture, I was shaped by the openness and generosity of my teachers, but also by the lack of what I saw in the curriculum in relation to the rich and complex experiences I had in the city. This mistrust for the historical record was shared by my generation–perhaps not architecture school (unfortunately), but certainly on the Campus and in the Country as a whole. My peers led the Rhodes Must Fall and subsequently the Fees Must Fall movements–which resonated with the world and seeded an array of calls for free, decolonised education. 

During my time as a student, I spent much of my time being in the city and working to learn from it. Johannesburg, with all the challenges of its deep and continued segregation, and all of its intensity, its hybrid and vernacular intelligences is my greatest teacher. 

I believe that there is architecture and creative expression and different modes of practising our disciplines embedded in our cultures - and I found so much inspiration in Johannesburg.
Now, I look at every  city and every condition we work in through that lens - there is always architecture waiting to happen in places that are overlooked. 

Looking at you and at your work I see at once the charisma of an iconoclast and the quiet power of a traditionalist, the rationalism of a Cartesian and the soul-warming altruism of a Believer. Do you actually live this dichotomy or is it a mirage?

To embody so many contrasting and contradictory worlds, ways and lenses is definitely something about me that crosses my mind from time to time. Though they may seem contradictory, I think they are in - fact - just a given factor of who I am, to a degree who we all are - hybrid - made up of many different ingredients. The English I speak is like this - accented and slanged with all sorts of influences - essentially its own thing. Jazz is like this. Architecture is like this too.
I believe therein is a power - that we make work that abstractly contains all these worlds means that we give others the opportunity to resonate with our work; we allow others in in a way that touches them on a profound and instinctive level - because we are appealing to some experience that is shared and then articulated in this hybridity.

A TIME100 Next List honouree, youngest architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion, artistic director of the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, I will not have enough space to pretend to an exhaustive list of your achievements. How does the word legacy resonate with you?

I think there is too much work to be done now - in the present - to be concerned with any notions of “success” - I am often frustrated with our generation’s focus and fascination with success rather than urgent attention to the work we need to do. Right now I feel that the work of expressing  hybrid identities into methods of practice is most urgent. These imaginations offer different visions and questions for our world - and without merely negating colonial worlds; they embody different worlds.

On the question of legacy, I believe that we are standing on the shoulders of so many - we are here because of the sacrifices that others made - Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Noguchi, Zaha Hadid, Balkrishna Doshi; and so many others. 

We need to see ourselves in that continuum, not here for our own success, but to honour our ancestors and the worlds of our children. 

“Societies flourish when old men plant trees; the shade of which they will never sit underneath.” 

Considering the urgency of the work, and how short life is, I feel like I have so much work to do. And for a long time, I was making this practice and it felt like speaking into a vacuum, and many people questioned the relevance of these ideas in the architectural realm and questioned their ability to translate into form or translate into anything. I'm incredibly honoured by the recent recognition, but I think it's important to acknowledge that when we have more visibility, it means that it gives others the confidence to be able to participate and engage in work from their own perspectives. I still feel this constant urgency for this work that still needs to be done. 

For example, my most recent competition win, the Asiat-Darse bridge in Vilvoorde, Belgium, was inspired by the Congolese activist and horticulturist Paul Panda Farnana. Though an important figure of the city and instrumental in its history, Farnana was not acknowledged for his immense impact - as an activist, Pan Africanist, an intellectual, an advocate for black slaves and an exceptional horticulturist. This important figure’s legacy was uncovered in my research of the city,  and I was left incredibly inspired by his story, which I’d never heard of. The project centres him and honours his life and his legacy, while also honouring the legacies of thousands of people who are unnamed and unknown.

For the form of the project, one of the research strands was water architectures from the Congo. During our research, we saw beautiful boat structures configured next to each other, which then became platforms for people to trade, gather, and share. The bridge takes the form of these boats and each of them are planted with species that come from Farnana’s research. Then, there are auxiliary boat structures that will embed themselves across areas of the riverbank, which will pollinate industrial areas across the landscape, as well as being a metaphor for healing. Each one will become a little garden of reflection and will be named in honor of the names that we found on the slave register.

There are so many untold stories, undreamt dreams, unmade worlds; waiting to be told.

A work of art for work of arts - as far as it gets from the White Cube and so-called 'Cultural Confinement" - you designed acclaimed art spaces. How do you envision the role of a gallery or a museum, as an architect?

I think the project of the museum as we know it is deeply in crisis and looking for relevance. In my role as Artistic Director of the Islamic Arts Biennale, I have brought my thinking as an architect to the project – in how I have thought through the theme, Awwal Bait – as a reflection on constructions of belonging; and in the conception of the narrative and subsequent spaces - as atmospheres and spaces for gathering. My practice is rooted in finding design form and artistic expression from our identities, which the Islamic Arts Biennale directly speaks to. Curation is pedagogical and research-driven and my practice has always been invested in that.

The works in the biennale are experiential – they put forth an entirely different definition for Islamic Art – rooted in the experiential, the oral, the aural, our ritual practices and the ingredients and infrastructures of gathering and community, in a way that doesn’t sit within the traditional sense of the gallery or museum. This project puts forward worlds that are resonant with our lives and come from different bodies of knowledge that can push forth the future of museums and creative practice differently. 

When we got the Serpentine brief and I looked at this commission – a very significant and visible commission on such a global platform – I felt that the lawn was waiting for a gesture. This is a platform to ask questions about architecture: What is a gallery and who is it for? How does it operate for different kinds of people? What is a truly public space? It was really essential for the project to take root in other places and to situate media, thinkers, work and programme from different realms into the same platform. This is a key part of the way I work, which is about trying to bring in the vibrancy and expression from other things to imbue architecture with some life and some magic.

Hannah Arendt defines the public space as a common field which "brings us together and yet prevents our falling over each other." What does community space mean in multicultural societies which used to deny the right to exist to other cultures / religion. How do we avoid a fragmented public space of communitarian bubbles? How do we build bridges between people?

I think platforms for sharing ideas, pavilions and biennale for example, are incredibly important in how they set the tone for the future and how they allow us to project our imaginations into those spaces. To understand that we have the opportunity to make the future of culture and cultural typologies through diverse voices and perspectives, which reference and resonate with such diverse geographies - is profound. I believe that platforms like this have a role to play in understanding the rich cultural and artistic heritages around us; and in nurturing and promoting understanding between communities. Our spaces are in dialogue with us; not only are we creating them; but they are creating us - we are born into architecture, and it reflects who we are to us, and it evolves our sense of who we are. What does that say of spaces that are not reflective of who we are?