Dele Adeyemo, Ibiye Camp & Dámaso Randulfe with alumni-in-residence Alexa Szekeres & Remi Kuforiji

Demonic Strata

Museu Nogueira da Silva

Demonic Strata presents a constellation of spatial propositions responding to the frictions between regimes of extraction and spaces of indeterminacy. This series of propositions emerged during the first iteration of a pedagogical experience initiated by Dele Adeyemo, Ibiye Camp and Dámaso Randulfe at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art (London). Exploring the potentials of black, indigenous and other-than-human spatial imaginaries, this transdisciplinary educational platform aims at collectively developing a paradigm for architectural production stemming from non-extractive practices of globalization. The installation charts models of refusal and resistance to the contemporary entanglement of extractive regimes, spanning mining of natural resources, logistical cartographic systems, and technoscientific modes of sensing. In a dialogue with the archive of Diamang (Angola’s Diamond Mining Company) developed during a residency at Index by alumni Alexa Szekeres and Remi Kuforiji, these explorations trace the genealogies and afterlives of the violent world-making technologies of the European colonial project and its uneven geographies of dispossession. The installation imagines an assemblage of tactics to confront the practices of inscription of bodies and the earth that sustain the logics of extraction while excluding other ways of being.

With work contributed by alumni Anusha Alamgir, Ayanna Blair-Ford, Cyprian Boateng, Emily Chooi, Helena Francis, Claire Greenland, Remi Kuforiji, Lina Noueiri, Maya Patel & Alexa Szekeres.

Dele Adeyemo, Ibiye Camp & Dámaso Randulfe with alumni-in-residence Alexa Szekeres & Remi Kuforiji

Dele Adeyemo is an architect and urban theorist conducting a Chase/AHRC funded PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research intersects Black studies with urban studies to question how the rise of logistics is driving processes of urbanization. Positioning slavery as the ghost in the machine of logistics, Dele explores how circulations established in transatlantic slavery, at the foundation of modernity, live on in the contemporary production of space. His work mobilizes a Black aesthetic through writing, film, and attention to movement and aural sensation in order to unsettle the mechanical fantasies of logistics to reveal its fleshy foundation.

Spanning art, architecture and design, Dámaso Randulfe’s work explores the entanglement of contemporary regimes of circulation, technologies, territories and ecologies. Dámaso is a tutor for ADS2 at the RCA, and an editor of Migrant Journal, a publication series on the spatial politics of human and other-than-human migrations. His work and various collaborative projects have been published, awarded and shown internationally, including at the Oslo Architecture Triennale,Venice Biennale, Triennale de Milano, Design Museum and Tate Modern.

Ibiye Camp is a multidisciplinary artist. Her work engages with technology, trade and material within the African Diaspora. At the Royal College of Art (RCA), Ibiye tutors in Media Studies and ADS2 at the School of Architecture. She holds an MA in Architecture from the RCA and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins.