Unsheltered
Unsheltered is a project investigation that recreates contested spaces like the Jazz Park where Thabo survives, in a post-apocalyptic doomsday future of 2159. It understands, adapts, and learns from informal urbanization by viewing informality through the lens adopted by Yiftachel. An act of survival by the homeless. It studies this by specifically looking at homeless previously disadvantaged black women to shelter themselves within that space. This is centered on the fact that Huchzermeyer, a South African architect and academic, argues that a large part of informal urbanization is due to a lack of black women’s mobility. In unsheltered, the only thing that matters is survival.
My project frames informal urbanization as a crisis, with warning stages. If ignored, the crisis goes into a chronic stage, with no turning point. One can only navigate through this crisis. With that in mind, I speculated on a crisis, the worst kind. I used films’ ability to create worlds and address a future that is to come.
The intervention is a subterranean world called the Hypogeal which can be understood as a biological term describing an organism’s activity below the soil surface, where it is sheltered from any earth activity in order to grow.
