This architectural project is a metaphor of the archaeological process of extraction. On a landscape embedded with the layers of displacement, dispossession, erasure and marginalisation, its aim lies in reading the social relations of the site and rewriting a set of spatial relations onto it.

Avalon Cemetery is bounded by the edges of Soweto, Lenasia and Eldorado Park, the margins where the non-European community of Johannesburg, dissected into Black, Indian and Coloured, was displaced to, respectively. Not only is the terrain is a common space of death, it is also the generator of political agency and cultural presence.

With this reading of place, the architectural intervention re-interprets the spatial expressions of power which act to separate, dispossess and erase, into those that connect, reclaim and reinstate. It proposed considering processes of burial and archiving as paralell, where built form fuses infrastructure and earth, becoming the stage on which the presence of the erased can be re-inscribed into the landscape.

Read the full research report here.

View the Corobrik presentation here.