“I use architecture to reveal stories that may not be visible at first,” says Sumayya Vally. She is Zooming with me from the London office of her research-based multidisciplinary practice, Counterspace (the firm also has a location in Johannesburg). The stories she is interested in — the lives of migrants throughout history, how community networks operate and the geological makeup of their lands — are close to her heart and her work. Counterspace’s first project, exhibited at the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015, was an analysis of Johannesburg’s abandoned mine; an extension of her thesis, it explored the highly polluted landscape as a visceral reminder of how waste, toxicity and radiation have become a quiet, sinister backdrop to our everyday world. The firm’s highest-profile project to date — a response to the historical erasure of informal community spaces across London — was created for the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. It included architectural references gathered from the city’s immigrant communities and was realized as an assemblage of reclaimed steel, cork, and timber covered with microcement.
In Arabic, “Sumayya” has many meanings; one of its interpretations is “to rise to the occasion.” Vally was born in South Africa in 1990, the year Nelson Mandela was freed, and grew up in Laudium, a township in western Pretoria where the apartheid government of the day forced the Indian population to live.
