Zimbabwean architect Thandi Loewenson wins US$100 ...

Zimbabwean architect Thandi Loewenson wins US$100 000 international prize

Patience Muchemwa

Zim Now Reporter

Harvard GSD officials last Friday announced the 2024 Wheelwright Prize winner as Thandi Loewenson for her proposal titled Black Papers: Beyond the Politics of Land, Towards African Policies of Earth & Air.

The senior tutor at London’s Royal College of Art is from Harare, Zimbabwe, and holds a PhD from The Bartlett.

The Wheelwright Prize is an open international competition hosted by Harvard that awards $100,000 every year to a talented early-career architect doing new forms of architectural research.

Loewenson’s says her set of studies focusing on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe is designed to shape both policy discourse and public perception.

“The question of land, and its indelible link to African liberation and being, echoes across the continent as a central theme of liberation movements and the postcolonial governments that followed. Instead of solely engaging land as a site of struggle, this work situates land within a network of interconnected spaces, from layers deep within the Earth to its outermost atmospheric reaches,” Loewenson said in a statement.

The Black Papers will include drawings, moving images, performances, and critical creative writing.

Loewenson said the multi-media approach will help her research reach various demographics across video, radio, and social media platforms including WhatsApp.

Loewenson will study various aspects including satellite imagery and digital infrastructure that casts light on the exploitation of mining labor.

She says her study of “Outer Space” will incorporate aerial techniques for surveying and prospecting as well as the mining of “technology metal,” minerals employed in networked devices that also underwrite a global system of digital dispossession.

“This research presents a radical shift: developing a new epistemic framework and a series of open access, creatively reimagined policy proposals—the Black Papers—in which earth and air are not distinct, but rather concomitant terrains through which racialization and exploitation are forged on the continent, and through which they will be fought,” Loewenson continued. “The Wheelwright Prize is uniquely placed to support such ambitious inquiry, enabling me to bring together seemingly disparate yet closely bound parts of our planet, and agitate for a more just and flourishing world.”