Sumayya Vally is the founder of the studio Counterspace, based between London and Johannesburg. Vally’s commitment to dialogue finds a new, intimate expression in the video series My Dinner with Sumayya, developed by TANK, inspired by the cult 1981 film My Dinner with Andre. The series consists of a set of far-ranging, unscripted conversations, from singer-songwriter Ali Sethi to sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. This format mirrors her architectural ethos: a belief that creation is a co-creative, non-hierarchical process, built on the slow, deliberate exchange of knowledge.

NW Something that struck me about the conversations I’ve watched you having during the series has been the quality of your attention. Have you always found it easy to listen?  

SV Recently, I have thought about listening and dialogue as a form of practice, in response to other people recognising me as a listener. Essentially, there are two types of architectural approach. All architecture is propositional, but one type arrives at a place speaking its own language. The other type enters into dialogue with its surroundings: it listens, absorbs, learns, and responds. For me, listening isn’t a practice I have worked to cultivate, because I grew up in a big household as the youngest of four. My brothers are much older than me, and I was quite young when they got married, so I inherited additional sisters early on, and then nieces and nephews and all the rest. I grew up with dozens of cousins, with whom I had a sibling relationship – something quite common in Black and brown families in my part of the world. And I grew up in a close-knit Apartheid-era township, where community life and activities – social life, mosque, religious rituals and festivals and community organising – are central in our ways of being. Being in that dynamic does lend itself to being a listener – being within a larger ecosystem, and a bigger mechanism. 

NW The same context could lead to someone being a shouter, in terms of competing for space.

SV I am lucky, in that when I was in third grade, my brothers were finishing school, and largely out of the house. So, when I was six and seven, the films and video games they were playing were my stimuli and inputs, which were very different to what my peers were interested in at the time. I have always believed there is a way to quietly make space rather than to seize it. Sometimes, people feel that if someone else is taking up space, it must mean there’s no space for them. In our white supremacist-capitalist society, we have been taught there is a pie, most of which has been eaten, and that there is one slice left for everyone else to share. But we need to be making new systems, by creating different logics and building different worlds.

NW How do you balance the two modes, of the propositional and the dialogue? Does your practice belong more in the latter camp? 

SV I hope so – though listening is important, speaking and reflecting are too. The architectural generation above me was called the “Starchitects”, as it involved many people who became known for a signature form. Figures like Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron were radical because they had a methodical approach based on listening. The mode of architecture centred on a singular great, now, has largely been rejected – in contrast, we attempt to be attentive and modest about how we listen and create. This doesn’t constitute a lack of boldness, but a focus on an architect’s responsibility to listen, absorb and then project. The architects who believe it is unsustainable to build, or that there are too many problems for different projections to take shape, are stuck in a paradigm that assumes the only logic we have is capitalist. This mindset shirks away from the responsibility that architecture should reflect where we want to be societally.

Ibraaz, where Sumayya was photographed, has its home at 93 Mortimer Street, a building that has served variously as the London Galvanic Hospital, a synagogue, and the German Athenaeum, a club for German artists and musicians.

The first Islamic Arts Biennale, 2023. Scenography by OMA with artistic direction by Sumayya Vally © Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of OMA.

Architecture is an
ideological representation of society, climate and environment, even in its simplest forms

The Islamic Arts Biennale 2023 showcased both historic artefacts and contemporary works, like this gold door, one of the original doors of the Kaaba. Scenography by OMA with artistic direction by Sumayya Vally © Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of OMA. 

The bookshop at Ibraaz, Maktaba, is run jointly by East London bookshop Burley Fisher and the Palestine Festival of Literature. 

NW Architecture encompasses a huge range of practices that aren’t just about building. What does architecture include and not include? 

SV Architecture is an ideological representation of society, climate and environment, even in its simplest forms, when it is innocuous or commercial. It is like a plastic moulded by many different forces. Often, architects don’t make buildings, but work in other fields, whether anthropology, urban planning or politics. Netanyahu is, unfortunately, an architect. An architectural education provides the ability to zoom out and see the complex relationships between things. It involves envisioning work by bringing things into being that don’t yet exist; identifying the forces around us and working out how to direct them. By that logic, it involves everything. However, some ideologies and mythologies have been historically left out of the mainstream architectural canon, many of which could not only propose solutions but offer entirely new questions for climate challenges and the contemporary breakdown of community. There is an opportunity to hybridise other worlds and produce different realities. 

NW You grew up in the outskirts of Johannesburg, and have spoken about how the sensory experience of that part of the world has informed your practice – phenomena like weather, and the quality of light. When did this coalesce into something you understood as architecture?

SV I grew up in a very small community called Laudium in Pretoria, South Africa. Pretoria was the headquarters of the apartheid administration and has a lot of incredible, for want of a better term, examples of apartheid architecture. The Voortrekker Monument is a Masonic temple built by Gerard Moerdijk on the Day of the Vow, when the Voortrekkers consolidated themselves as the ruling power. Each year, on that day, a ray of light shines through the oculus of the monument. Several other buildings in the fabric of Pretoria embody the type of architecture that the apartheid government employed to project itself as the most avant-garde group in the world. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Pretoria, and the campus was a trophy cabinet of architecture influenced by Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. We see the implication of culture in the projection of power now, with Israel. 

Like in all cities and landscapes in South Africa, we grew up there because of the ethnic division during apartheid. Between our township and the city of Pretoria was an industrial buffer zone, built with the apartheid logic of being able to shut down very quickly. There is one entrance and one exit. I grew up in a close-knit, ethnically homogenous but religiously and culturally diverse community. Well, “ethnically homogenous” is a misnomer because there are so many different languages and cultures in South Asia – but, largely, I grew up with others whose families came from the Indian subcontinent, and that is visible in the way I think about practice. Life was organised by community activity and activism against apartheid. Advocates like Jody Kollapen and local imams, scholars and community leaders acted as stalwarts in terms of politically motivating the community. As Muslims, we extend our geography to the Muslim world, and Palestine and Kashmir were both causes from a young age. When I was in first grade, I performed a poem at school that started, “My name is Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine and Kashmir.” So, despite growing up in a very small community, I felt connected to the wider world and was part of an ecosystem of organising. Sensorially, I grew up with a lot of religious diversity, hearing church bells as well as prayers from the temple – truly Pan-African and Pan-Islamic in the widest senses. Then, the mosque or the community hall became places for many activities, like football, or where people would meet friends, or women would cook for each other. Because it is an apartheid township, it wasn’t structured in the same way that white townships were, as the infrastructure was built by the community. For instance, gas stations are important places for young people to socialise, and people do so from their cars, from which a sound system culture emerged. These interstitial spaces become places of congregation. 

My mother is from Johannesburg, and my grandfather had stores in the inner city. As a child, walking those streets was a formative experience in the early days of South Africa becoming a democracy – I was four when Mandela was elected as president. It was a time of extreme possibility, jubilance and optimism. I grew up with immense pride to be South African and immense – but quiet – confidence in Islam and my Indian heritage. Our country has in many ways managed to engender a diversity without any soft pressures of assimilation. We are affirmed in our plurality, there are no contradictions. My generation tends to believe we need to go beyond the Rainbow Nation and look at structural change, as South Africa remains the most unequal society in the world – but at that time, it had a powerful role in bringing us together as a country and in solidifying the confidence people have in their own cultures. This is not as present in the West. Then, as you mentioned, there is a strong element of the land. The area that we grew up in was surrounded by veld grass, and I remember as a young child finding huge conglomerates of pink and purple precious stones, and seeing incredible flora and fauna in both suburban and urban environments. I reckon with the power and sublimity of nature every day, all of which are inherently architectural. 

NW We can explain what’s happening in Palestine as a deformation of a collective psychic architecture, but there’s also a significant physical reality to the segregation. Like apartheid towns in South Africa, cities in Israel and Palestine are divided through infrastructure, formal and informal. I am thinking of the nets strung at the top of streets in Hebron to catch the rocks and rubbish that settlers throw onto the Palestinian inhabitants below. What relationship exists between the idea of psychic architecture and physical architecture?  

SV They produce each other. As a student, I remember looking at the apartheid city planning diagrams to understand the awareness of their effect, but day-to-day, these systems operate invisibly. Nobody thinks about the domestic worker they employ who commutes for four hours by train to work, and the knock-on effect that has on her children. The question is economic and legal, but also urban-planned, spatial and architectural, because South Africa’s cities were designed to keep people apart. In apartheid, zoos, parks and trees were built as buffer zones so that white people never had to see people of colour, unless they worked for them. There are also differences among people of colour. In South Africa, Black people often live near toxic areas – mine waste dumps, sewage plants – and are situated the furthest away from economic opportunity. On an urban level, our lives and movements are organised and we are segregated; on an architectural level, we are taught about the dignities we deserve and do not deserve. Due to its resilient and systematic nature, apartheid still largely organises how our society works. Yet architectural models also provide ways for thinking beyond it. Two friends of mine, Elias and Yousef Anastas, have cultivated a community in Bethlehem, The Wonder Cabinet, that is a radio station and a place for makers. We have similar models in Africa that also operate in the lineage of South Africa’s Radio Freedom – the Pan-African Space Station, and Chimurenga, a Shona word meaning “revolutionary struggle”. These are places where people would gather and, under the guise of socialising, strategise. Each one represents a slippage in the overarching system. My 2021 Serpentine Pavilion was inspired by revolutionary spaces like that in London, both past and present. The quiet assimilation that’s asked of us in the West is also produced by the physical architecture of cities, and what’s allowed to be heard. At first, it affects the psyche on an individual level, then on a collective one. If we don’t have an awareness of how it’s operating, then we become implicated.

NW Tell me about your Serpentine Pavilion, and how it brought those informal places across the city into the design.

SV For the Serpentine, we mapped gathering places for migrant communities in London and understood them as tentacles for belonging, but also as generators for cultural movements and modes of cultural production. I became interested in how these places of belonging that we researched became engines for cultural production. The Mangrove Restaurant, which was opened in 1968 by Trinidadian community activist and civil rights campaigner Frank Crichlow, served food from different geographies, used recipes from people’s homes, and welcomed a diverse and vibrant mix of people, from Nina Simone and Vanessa Redgrave to neighbourhood aunties. This allowed for creativity to flourish, and the restaurant birthed movements like the Notting Hill Carnival and the first calypsos, as well as the West Indian Gazette by Claudia Jones. I thought about this in creating “Fragments”, when we placed pieces of my Pavilion in community arts institutions in London, working with them to programme events across the summer and beyond. Some of these projects, like the radio station at the Valance Library in Barking and Dagenham, and Support Structures for Support Structures – a grant programme that I worked on initiating at the Serpentine – are still ongoing. Because of the way the world has been constructed, thinking of one place always implicates other places. My practice is really preoccupied with these complex and beautiful relationships between territories and places. 

NW Architecture is perhaps the most omnipresent form of design, but also the most invisible. Even though we look at buildings every day, they are backdrop, not character.

SV That is what makes architecture so powerful, because it exists subliminally but has such an impact. We’re born into a world that tells us, “This is your place,” and that is affirmed by our surroundings and how our movement is organised. We are told this is what you deserve from both infrastructure and edifices. The sense of belonging stems from what we feel on the inside, and how comfortably this interacts in dialogue with what’s around us. It is only then that we can evolve the conversation because it starts from a deeper place than, “This is who I am and I have a right to exist.” From there, we have the opportunity to deepen the project of self-manifestation, cultural expression and all the layers that sit beneath basic human rights, the right to service and delivery. Underneath all of that is a project of beauty and of self-expression. Architecture’s ultimate role is to engender our sense of belonging and support our personal, cultural and mythological evolution. 

NW  What projects are you working on currently that create a sense of belonging in places it might not otherwise exist? 

SV We recently launched Ibraaz, an arts space dedicated to amplifying voices, practices, and perspectives from the Middle East, North Africa, and its diaspora. This project is unique in that it is envisioned as an incremental unfolding; a gathering of gatherings. It will grow and evolve over time, responding to how people use it. At its heart, the project is less about static architecture and more about an ongoing choreography of space, activated by dialogue, learning and exchange. The project is a living framework, and many of its elements offer multiple configurations to accommodate and generate a plurality of encounters. The research behind the Ibraaz space was grounded in a drawing of ritual, urban and vernacular architectural forms, with a particular focus on Tunisia and, more broadly, the Arab and African worlds and their adjacent and diasporic geographies. In these settings, gathering often unfolds in informal, fluid ways – in corridors, on staircases, at thresholds, and across counters – that both separate and connect. These spontaneous points of assembly reflect a deeply embedded cultural rhythm, where social interaction is shaped as much by improvisation as by design. We were particularly intrigued by how simple interventions – a chair, a bench, a table – can radically alter the dynamics of a space. Such elements choreograph movement, dictate the terms of engagement, and influence how people relate to one another. Some of these traditional typologies include majlis (assembly space), minassa (platform), oula (shared surface), and madrasah (space of learning). At street level, the Maktaba bookshop and Oula cafe serve as open invitations to the city, creating an interactive façade that embodies Ibraaz’s ethos of openness. The Majlis, or assembly space, is the main exhibition hall on the ground floor, designed equally as a space for gathering. On the lower ground floor, Minassa is a theatre for screenings and musical performances. The second floor houses Iqra, the library, extending the invitation to engage, read, and reflect. Apart from Ibraaz, for an upcoming project we are looking at the history of Sylhet, in Bangladesh, and what happened when the border was drawn between East and West Bengal. Then we’re currently working on a private artist residency and museum for a friend on an olive oil orchard in Gabes, Tunisia. On a fairly recent site visit, our host talked about the supreme intelligence of olive trees, and how they communicate with each other. They can make their leaves bitter when under threat by goats – but not only do they turn bitter themselves, but they communicate this to their network of surrounding trees so that they all turn bitter too. Though I have always known about the sacredness of olive oil, olives and olive trees – of its presence in rituals, medicines and mythologies – this trip gave me a visceral understanding of that sacrality. .

Sumayya Vally’s Serpentine Pavilion 2021. The building was constructed of reclaimed steel, cork and timber, covered with micro-cement. Photos by Iwan Baan, courtesy Counterspace.

A render of the Asiat Darse bridge, Vilvoorde, courtesy of Counterspace.