About Forts of Sand

“He marvelled at the dreams, and how clear they were. He marvelled at the people who had risen, as if from a millennial sleep, from the ocean bed that had been their home. And he was filled with wonder at the great and enduring beauty of the new civilisation they had built for themselves in their invisible spaces. They had built it as their sanctuary. it was the fruit of what they had learned during those long years of suffering and oblivion at the bottom of the ocean.”

— BEN OKRI

Miliswa approaches architecture as the practice of manifesting the fantasy of persons/people through space-making. Her interests lie in dismantling the continued construction and preservation of spatio-political utopias, through world-building techniques such as what African American feminist writer Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation” and child-play.

Under the guidance of her supervisors in the Unit 19 research unit at the Graduate School of Architecture, Miliswa developed a research methodology that explored storytelling, image-making, and performance as transformative architectural tools.

After graduating, she expanded her research, using mycelium as both a material and narrative device in speculative mapping. Her research in the Bio Art - Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at VIAD, which proposes the natural degradation of protected colonial structures in southern Africa, focuses on the experimental use of microbes like mycelium and mould to model new spatial fantasies and futures. Miliswa’s works were exhibited in the Situated Making, SYM|BIO|ART and Imminent and Eminent Ecologies exhibitions at FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg, between 2022-2024. Her work in the Imminent and Eminent Ecologies exhibition was featured in twenty-fifth issue of ARTAFRICA Magazine.

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