Quiet Conversations asks how architectural and spatial research might contend with inherited spatial violence alongside acts of resistance and repair. The conversation series engages eight spatial practitioners, artists, and architects from across the global south in the first phase with interviewees from Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa; and with a focus on South Africa and Colombia in the second phase. The resulting audio and transcripts aim to build towards an inter-disciplinary methodological toolkit for a reparative approach to spatial practice and inhabitation. Published within Ellipses […] Journal for Creative Research, the series aims to open up wider conversations on how we might collectively contend with southern territories across geographic distances. This lateral engagement aims to forge new conversations to build a relational, epistemic, and methodological intervention into architectural theory and practice.

Catalina Mejía Moreno is a spatial practitioner, educator, and researcher interested in practices of repair and resistance; environmental, racial, and spatial justice; feminist, and decolonial/anticolonial practices and thought. She is a senior lecturer in climate studies at the Spatial Practices Programme in Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she leads an interdisciplinary research and exchange platform that rethinks spatial practices and pedagogies through the lens of the biodiversity and climate crisis. She holds a master’s in architectural history from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of the Arts London, and a doctorate in architectural theory and criticism from Newcastle University. She has been Andrew W. Mellon research Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and grant recipient from the Getty Research Institute and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Her work has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Architectural Histories, and Harvard Design Magazine, amongst others.

Huda Tayob is a lecturer at the University of Manchester. She was the former History & Theory Programme Convener and coleader of Unit 18 at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. Her doctoral research studied the spatial practices of African migrants and refugees in Cape Town, with a particular focus on mixed-use markets established and run by these populations and their wider trans-national connections. Her academic interests include a focus on minor and subaltern architectures and archival silences. Her recent publications include “Subaltern Architectures: Can Drawing ‘Tell’ a Different Story” (2018) and “Architecture-by-Migrants: The Porous Infrastructures of Bellville” (2019). She is cocurator of the open-access curriculum project RaceSpaceArchitecture.org and the Archive of Forgetfulness, a pan-African online exhibition and podcast series.