Creating a network of posts adopting the logic of minarets and totems

Architect and founder of Counterspace, Somaya Valli,

with artist Moad Mesbahi and sound artist Tania Petersen,

and sound designer Sukanta Majumdar, creating an installation consisting of a grid of prisms, to construct a “logic of minarets and totems”.

The installation, titled African Post Office, is displayed in a special section, called Force Majeure,

It forms part of a six-part Laboratory of the Future curated by Leslie Loko at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

In Force Majeure, 16 architects, including David Adjaye and Diébédo Francis Kéré, showcase

Their works in this section are on display in the central pavilion at the Place Giardini.

Works Vali and Mosbahi, African Post Office,

As a new installation and performance piece at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

In response to Lesley Lokko’s theme of “Lab of the Future”,

the team created a speculative proposal that imagines an infrastructure that will bridge continents.

Metal vertical columns of varying heights are represented as a vertical “column” that becomes the most important element in architecture.

Where gatherings are held – from totems and prayer staffs to minarets and sound systems.

Design features

In the installation, the team plays with the double sense of “post”:

the installation serves as a spatial reinterpretation of the post as a pole,

And as a mechanism, the postal network infrastructure takes into account the paths of previous traffic.

The installation is envisioned as a space for sorting and processing,

developing an “intercontinental bureaucratic apparatus” using the simple technology of mail.

While the work is tested visually and audibly, the team develops language and a related indicator for the “post,”

Based on the logic of minarets and totems,

two sociocultural technologies with far-reaching African influence.

The range of columns has different thicknesses and heights that have individual markings and attachments.

“While some carry the flags of countries that no longer exist,

others are just anchor points waiting to be moored,” the team said.

Moad Mesbahi stated that “The African Post Office is a proposal for a fictional office,

in the genre of Afro-Futurist art practice,

To speculate about how different infrastructures and musical performances might come together,

and to learn from the past, to imagine the possibilities of such intercontinental gatherings.

By defining a point, writing it down and raising it,

a project emerges that harmonizes space and social relations, the team explained.

This work is also derived from the work of counterspace maqam,

which is an Arabic word designating a musical scale and an actual gathering space.

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