GSA Archi Week Lecture: Dr Dele Adeyemo – The Ritual is the Architecture: Trans-cosmological Mapping, Ontogenesis, and the Invention of Tradition
Date: 26 August 2026
Time: 18:00 – 20:30
Venue: UJ FADA Auditorium
Auckland Park, Johannesburg
RSVP: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/inHmq6pp3h
Dr Dele Adeyemo’s artistic and spatial research practice, based between the UK and West Africa, blurs the boundaries between disciplines to document informal cultures of making and shaping space across Africa and the Black diaspora. Through collaborative research and creative practice, he develops new concepts for designing, building, and teaching architecture.
Grounded in the premise that the current planetary crisis has been driven by the extractive architectures of capitalism, Adeyemo asks how architecture might be imagined beyond capitalism. Drawing on Indigenous African cosmologies and mapping what he describes as the Black radical spatial imaginary, he employs drawing, film, and installation design to demonstrate that alternative architectures are not merely possible—they already exist.
His practice investigates the historical emergence of capitalism’s destructive spatial paradigm, examines the ways it continues to shape the present, and foregrounds the radical spatial imaginaries of people and communities who have created their own forms of space beyond dominant systems.
Graphic: @dieateljee