Advanced Researcher (Forensic Architecture/Goldsmiths, University of London)

Agata Nguyen Chuong is advanced researcher at Forensic Architecture and PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She leads FA’s research on the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in present-day Namibia. Her research focuses on environmental and colonial violence and evidencing their enduring legacies in support of Indigenous land claims and advocacy.

Traces of the German colonial genocide in Namibia endure in the memories and oral traditions of the descendants of the victims, and in the region’s transformed environment. Starting in 2022, Forensic Architecture and Forensis undertook a multi-year collaboration with Ovaherero and Nama traditional leadership and genocide activist groups to produce a series of investigative works into the genocide and its far-reaching legacy. Weaving together the lived knowledge of the affected communities with digital research practices, these collaborative projects endeavour to bring those traces to the surface, by reconstructing key geographies relating to the genocide and the ecologies forever altered by a century of dispossession and colonial land-use practices. This presentation will discuss the counter-archival methodologies developed by Forensic Architecture and Forensis throughout this multi-phase project and undertake critical ‘counter-readings’ of colonial-era photographs and cartographic material, re-narrated through inherited testimony. Through focus on a few specific archival encounters, the presentation will demonstrate how researchers can work against the grain of the epistemic violences underpinning colonial collections and in so doing, reflect on the methodological and ethical implications of using colonial photographs in investigative spatial research.

Researcher and co-founder of AMASyria (The Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria أرشيف العمارة الحديثة في سوريا )

Ahmad Salah is an architect, researcher, and cultural practitioner whose work focuses on built and natural landscapes and their intersections with cultural and social domains in the Middle East, with a particular focus on infrastructure. He is the co-founder and director of AMASyria—The Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria. Ahmad holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Damascus University and a Master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. He has collaborated on research projects with institutions across Europe and the Middle East, and his work has been supported by the Gwaertler Cultural Foundation, Edinburgh College of Art, and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC).

The historiography of Syrian architectural modernity has often emphasised colonial or authoritarian narratives over locally embedded accounts. This emphasis stemmed from archival imbalances: colonial archives were systematically preserved and accessible, while local archives remained fragmented and restricted. Moreover, under authoritarian rule, independent knowledge production was further suppressed. The consequences of this imbalance extend beyond academia: archives shape collective memory, which in turn informs societal values, enabling accountability and public debate. Without them, memory is distorted, limiting society’s capacity to resist injustice and to assert ownership over its knowledge. Efforts to mitigate these issues often create new dependencies on extractive institutions, which shape value through selective support or by acquiring collections rather than building local capacity. As a result, existing imbalances in resources and authority are frequently reproduced rather than dismantled. AMASyria was established in response to these limitations and operated within and against them. Its methodology aims to rethink archival practice by rethinking knowledge production in three key ways. First, it foregrounds the local, countering colonial framings and fragmented repositories. Second, it engages fluidly and flexibly with archival materials by incorporating alternative forms of documentation, including oral testimonies, personal collections, and professional networks, while also exploring alternative participatory spaces of documentation and discussion, such as social media, thereby challenging the notion of the archive as a stable rigid construct. Third, it prioritizes accessibility, framing archiving as an act of resistance to restriction and surveillance. AMASyria aims to operate as an evolving archival practice rather than a closed repository, proposing a plural and participatory model through which Syrian architectural history can be articulated from within its own contexts. Beyond preservation, it pursues knowledge sovereignty: it attempts to construct independent infrastructures that enable collective self-understanding. In this sense, the archive functions as a self-reflexive project, one that must remain open to continual critique and reconfiguration as a condition of its political and epistemic relevance.

doctoral fellow (gta Institute ETH Zurich)

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk is an architectural researcher and designer. She is the founder and creative director of Matri-Archi(tecture) , an association of African and diasporic spatial practitioners exploring entangled histories, realities, and imaginaries through spatial expression. A doctoral fellow at gta, ETH Zürich, her PhD examines how Black foreign women in Zürich have constructed forms of kinship to create liveable geographies in the wake of racial-sexual violence since the 1980s. Khensani works across visual, written, and sonic media to remember untold histories and envision new spatial futures. Her practice frames architecture as a storyteller of place, memory, and possibility. She sustains a practice grounded in the geographies of both Switzerland and South Africa.

The Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010) was a self-initiated grassroots meeting place and resource centre for Black foreign women in Zurich. It served as a vital site of community, cultural expression, and affirmation within an urban context that often rendered Black womanhood hypervisible as exotic and invisible as social subject. Offering legal and social counselling, a youth forum, accessible childcare, health and gender-based violence advice, and programming on racism and conviviality, the Treffpunkt became the only Black feminist project in Zurich during the late twentieth century to quite literally have a room of its own. Since the demolition of its building in 2013, no physical trace of the Treffpunkt remains. Its history is largely absent from official Swiss archives, existing instead in whispered footnotes and in over 500 family photographs held in the personal collections and photo albums of the women who frequented the space. As Tina Campt reminds us in Image Matters (2012), the significance of such photographs lies not only in what is visible but in the socio-spatial relations that constitute the “social life of the photo.” To archive is to fix, possess, and delimit. Remembering practices, however, open fluid ways of engaging with histories that unfold in places that have left no built trace. Within my PhD, worlding archives of the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen in Zurich (1993–2010), I work with oral histories and photographs to reconstruct the Treffpunkt through collage—refusing archival fixity while foregrounding embodied, situated memory. As Katherine McKittrick reminds us in Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), citation can be a way of “sharing how we know.” Through collage, this work resists what Patricia Hill Collins terms “controlling images” of Black womanhood by offering a voiced and visual method that privileges remembering practices over fixed archives—one way to cite and hold Black women’s spaces in architectural history.

Professor of Architecture and Head of School (University of Liverpool)

Nwola Uduku is Head of School at Liverpool School of Architecture and Co-director of the AHUWA Research Centre, which focuses on Architectural History and Urbanism in Western Africa. She is also involved with Docomomo International, and the Shared heritage Africa project, She co-edited the recently published Modernism in Africa, Birkhauser, 2024), has written on School Design in Africa (Uduku, 2017). She has recently contributed to ‘Who are Godwin and Hopwood” (Tosland, 2024) and The Architecture, Empire and Trade, (Jackson, et al 2025). Also through her membership of the University of Manchester-based African Cities Research Consortium, ACRC she regularly comments on urbanism and social infrastructure issues in Africa. Her most recent publication is the chapter, Learning Spaces in Africa: From Missionaries to Development Hubs in Learning Ecologies in Architecture, ArchiTangle, London, 2025.

This paper begins by questioning what the term ‘restitution’ brings to our understanding and engagement with archives we engage with. Unlike its use in relation to the physical artefacts [which are now making their way back, being shared or loaned to African repositories], I argue archival restitution is a much more piecemeal and fluid process. The classical understanding of archive remains focused on the boxes of text and occasionally material artefacts stored in a room, climate controlled or otherwise. Archive restitution in a post-colonial [African] context is a much broader messier project. Comprising the collection of unarchived material; oral histories of unrecorded actors, acknowledgement of intangible heritage practices that also contribute to our encounter with the restored post-colonial archive, and re-categorised artefacts to name but a few. The challenge therefore of engaging with the archive is significant, this is not a relatively static process, involving hours of engagement with material in the traditional ‘archive’ supplemented with formal/informal interviewing with a few sources and a cursory visit to sites. It is a much more ethnological feat, which often does not have a defined ending; there is an expectation that more information will be forthcoming and the archive needs to be ‘open’ enough to receive this. Like an architect’s own house design or fine wine, the archive is never finished and grows in maturity with time. This means that its use and interpretation is expected to constantly change and transform, in all forms; from text to orality, or indeed location-situation. This approach is both exciting and challenging but makes for a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation, as with a ‘free-form’ jazz piece there may be a theme but the piece is ever changing… Our ongoing encounter with the Alan Vaughan Richards Archive is the main case study that frames this piece.

Based in Berlin, Robin Coenen is an information designer working at the intersection of design, science, technology, and visual anthropology. After studying Visual Communication at FH Aachen and Zurich University of the Arts, he led the Digital Media Department at Atelier Intégral Ruedi Baur in Paris before pursuing graduate studies in Data Visualization at Parsons School of Design in New York.In 2020, Robin co-founded the design studio Visual Intelligence together with sociologist and designer Danielle Rosales. The studio explores the visual articulation of complex artistic, social, and technological systems. In 2025, he co-founded conQrete Tech, a computer-vision startup bridging artificial intelligence and information design.Since 2021, he has been a research associate in the Class for Information Design at the University of the Arts Berlin. His academic and artistic research focuses on mapping, data visualization, and digital methodologies in design research as tools for knowledge production, transformation, and dialogue.