Tidal Memories: Spatialising Archives of Indigenous Life with Water

What does it mean to give space, literally, to knowledge that has never been designed for walls? This talk invites you into the practice of Feifei Zhou, a spatial designer and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of ecology, architecture, and the stories that landscapes hold.
Feifei's practice is built on a quietly radical premise: that the built and natural environment is not a backdrop to human life, but an active participant in it. Working across disciplines with natural and social scientists, she translates research into spatial and visual languages that make visible the more-than-human forces shaping our world. Her work takes many forms, from large-scale digital publications and museum commissions to intimate drawings and site-specific installations, but the question underneath all of it stays the same: why is it important to spatialise vernacular and often neglected forms of knowledge, and how can spatial practice make them visible, legible, and enduring?

In 2024, she founded terriStories (草木), a spatial design studio grounded in the cultural and ecological life of specific places. She has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and at Chulalongkorn University's International Program in Design and Architecture in Bangkok.

In Tidal Memories: Spatialising Archives of Indigenous Life with Water, Feifei brings this body of work into conversation with a specific and urgent question: how do we archive what water remembers? Drawing on her current research into the Orang Seletar, a sea-nomadic indigenous community whose stilt architecture along the Johor Strait holds a living archive of knowledge about water, land, and survival, she will walk through the spatial, cultural, and methodological dimensions of her practice. Expect to come away thinking differently about what design can be asked to do, and for whom.

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Host or Publisher NAFA Faculty of Art & Design