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SUMMARY:South X Initiative Event: Lesego Bantsheng\, "The Material Costs o
 f Performing Urbanisation"
DTSTART:20261012T183000
DTEND:20261012T200000
DTSTAMP:20261008T004353Z
UID:5b8ec77825af8b43096efba2c71c421dd6b380041e5db1db01431c66
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Lesego Bantsheng is a South African researcher\, urban designe
 r and landscape architect whose work explores the material and spatial com
 plexities of rural life across Southern Africa. She is the founder and co-
 director of Rural Futurisms NPC\, a research and design platform that inve
 stigates how rural communities negotiate change through making\, adaptatio
 n and collective knowledge. Bantsheng’s work examines how everyday mater
 ials\, infrastructures and spatial practices shape contemporary rural life
 . Bantsheng holds a Master of Urban Design from The Bartlett School of Arc
 hitecture\, UCL\, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Universi
 ty of Cape Town.\nLesego Bantsheng (Rural Futurisms): "The Material Costs 
 of Performing Urbanisation" \nMonday\, 12 October 2026\; 18:30 \nSG Foye
 r\, EPFL \n\nAcross rural South Africa\, materials such as red soil\, cla
 y\, cement\, corrugated metal\, plastic and glass are assembled into spati
 al forms that exceed neat distinctions between traditional and modern\, ve
 rnacular and industrial\, rural and urban. These landscapes are frequently
  interpreted as incomplete urbanization or degraded vernacularism but may 
 be better understood as material responses to conflicting aspirations and 
 uneven development.\n\nThe lecture builds on the proposition that urbaniza
 tion is not simply a material process but a demand to adopt particular asp
 irations. In many rural territories\, inhabitants are compelled to perform
  urbanity through suburban house typologies\, private mobility\, certain m
 aterial accumulation\, enclosure and individual property imaginaries\, whi
 le remaining excluded from promised infrastructures. Drawing on the work o
 f Rural Futurisms in the Ngaka Modiri Molema region\, the lecture proposes
  that craft should not be understood as the preservation of tradition\, bu
 t as a technology of approximation: the material labour through which rura
 l communities pursue\, perform\, negotiate and sometimes abandon the aspir
 ations of urbanizing. \nBy examining the uneasy coexistence of red soil a
 nd cement\, communal land and enclosure\, livestock and private mobility\,
  organic and inorganic making materials\, the lecture explores how aspirat
 ion becomes material\, and how material practices reveal the contradiction
 s\, compromises and negotiations through which urbanity is performed.\n\nA
 bout the 2026 "South X Craft: Matters of Making" Lecture Series:\nCraft is
  often used to evoke nostalgia and has been employed in the language of ot
 hering and fetishizing ‘Global Southern’ communities. At the same time
  craft holds the potential to re-ground design in ecological and social sp
 ecificities and attend closely to materiality. We thus seek to use it as a
  critical lens towards the built environment. We ask how craft can be enga
 ged rigorously and ethically: attentive to the political economies of who 
 makes\, whose knowledge is valorized\, and how traditional practices are b
 eing reshaped by contemporary conditions. \n 
LOCATION:Foyer SG
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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