You could be forgiven for missing the fact – and it was a fact – that a scandal was brewing. Fermented by rumour and ambition, and dispensed in long missives on the airwaves and in letters to the editor, it rendered the atmosphere salty and dry. And yet somehow it was out of reach, over there, elsewhere, in another register. To really know it, she needed to tune her body to just the right frequency, to attend to the thickness of the air and the density of ground, the simultaneous silence and presence of kin, and to hold the city – for a moment – within.

Thandi @ThandiLoewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who operates through design, fiction and performance to interrogate our perceived and lived realms and to speculate on the possible worlds in our midst. Using storytelling as a design tool and tactic, she engages in projects which provoke questions, whilst working with communities and policy makers towards acting on those provocations. Thandi is currently a PhD candidate at The Bartlett, where she is developing these ideas through practice-led research, exploring the extractive agendas driving the urban development of Lusaka. Central to her research is a live project, investigating how insertions of the other worldly and the downright weird can support the city council and a community of waste pickers to produce a speculative tender recognizing them as partners of the state; offering a counter to extractive urban agendas & influencing the future of the city dump.