The 411 on Miliswa — See Miliswa Play: Practice-Led Design Research

© Lungelo Mchunu

THE 411:
Miliswa Ndziba is a South African architect and worldbuilder. She approaches architecture as the practice of manifesting the fantasy of persons/people through space-making. Her interests lie in dismantling the continued construction and preservation of spatio-political utopias, through world-building techniques such as what African American feminist writer Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation” and child-play.

Ndziba is a Research Associate at VIAD at the University of Johannesburg. Her research in the Bio Art - Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at VIAD, which proposes the natural degradation of protected colonial structures in southern Africa, focuses on the experimental use of microbes like mycelium and mould to model new spatial fantasies and futures. Her recent works have been exhibited in the Situated Making and Imminent and Eminent Ecologies exhibitions at FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg. Her work in the Imminent and Eminent Ecologies exhibition was recently featured in ARTAFRICA Magazine.

Ndziba holds a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture Honours from the Graduate School of Architecture(GSA) at the University of Johannesburg, and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Pretoria.

In 2022, Ndziba co-founded the cross-disciplinary collective room19isaFactory., that works to build an intellectual and practice vocabulary around what they term Unreasonable Architecture — a practice that retires spatial practices rooted in frameworks of modern reason and chronopolitics, to determine new modes of society-making through alternative cosmologies and knowledge systems. The collective’s projects include installations in Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, Johannesburg, the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA) in Accra, Ghana, and the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. In 2023, she co-founded What Has Two Eyes and Two Many Ears? (WHTETME Living), which is a ritual heirloom homeware studio out of KwaZulu in southern Africa that seeks to recollect the functional use of indigenous ritual heirlooms that have been decontextualised, and rendered primitive and static as artifacts; collected; and stored in museums and private collections around the world.