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FUGITIVE ARCHIVES: The Afterlives of Colonial Infrastructure

Yamikani Mnthambala

University of Johannesburg

This research investigates the relationships between infrastructure, colonial power, and marginalized communities. In South Africa, these relationships become more acute where infrastructure has been weaponized in strategies of extraction and segregation. Durban thus provides a critical locus for examining these themes as an entrepôt and major port. Fugitive Archives: The Afterlives of Colonial Infrastructures investigates how architecture might operate as a critical tool to challenge, resist, and reimagine these inherited structures. Fugitivity forms a critical thematic, framing both the evasive action of infrastructures and negotiations thereof by communities structured by them. The study constructs a spatial registry of infrastructural fugitivity and architectural countermeasures that speculate on equitable futures. This research focuses on Durban’s South Industrial Basin, in particular the Engen oil refinery, and its relationship with its fenceline communities, Merebank and Wentworth, as they grapple with environmental and physical violences, archival silences, and tactics of resistance developed by these communities. Through my two methodologies, “Redaction as Resistance” and “Eidetic Collaging,” the research evidences processes of advocacy and counterinscription, culminating in a speculative architectural proposition. The decommissioning of the Engen Oil Refinery becomes an opportunity to renegotiate a historically contested site through tactics of insertion, remediation, and occupation. Architecture here assumes a companion role—facilitating community ingress, accountability, and collective regeneration within the afterlives of colonial infrastructures.

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