Why be a sunflower and turn toward the sun? I myself am the sun

📍 9 December, 5.30pm, LT1 RCA Kensington Campus and Online

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Why be a sunflower and turn toward the sun?

I myself am the sun

Ousmane Sembene

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In a moment of acute cultural, environmental, and geopolitical change, this roundtable asks how exhibitions can operate as critical tools - capable not only of reframing pasts, but provoking paradigm shifts in how we see, think and make architecture, and those who produce it.

Join us to discuss the border- and discipline-breaking role of biennales, and the tensions and frictions when the work they seek to do meets practical, institutional and state apparatus.

We ask how architectural narratives are formed, who shapes them, and what remains invisible? What does insurgent or disobedient practice look like today, and how does it resist flattening and cooptation?

And how might reimagining curatorial practices open new possibilities for the worlds architectural practice can work to design into being?

• Omar Degan is the principal of DO Architecture Group, an international architecture and research practice with offices in Mogadishu, Italy, and the USA. He specializes in addressing some of the most pressing global challenges, including post-conflict reconstruction, natural disasters, and climate adaptation. Degan is the inaugural curator of the Pan-African Architecture Biennale, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2026.

• Myles Igwebuike is a designer, researcher, and social innovator, living and working between Enugu, Nigeria and London. He merges dynamism with craft, employing aesthetic disruption and adaptation across various mediums. Myles draws inspiration from his southeastern Nigerian roots and positions himself as a cultural bridge and custodian of heritage. He’s committed to community power and inclusive design, aiming to forge a universal language that transcends medium constraints. He is special assistant to the Governor of Anambra state on transportation, A World Economic Forum Global Shaper and sits as a design expert on Design Council, the U.K’s national strategic advisor on design. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Myles is recognized for his critical thinking and research-driven practice. He was named one of Architectural Digest’s AD100 Rising Stars to Watch for 2024 and was selected as the curator for the Nigerian Pavilion at the 2025 London Design Biennale.

• Adrian Lahoud is an architect, urban designer and researcher as well as Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, and co-chair of the Rights of Future Generations Working Group. Previously, he was Studio Master at Projective Cities, Architectural Association, London, and Director of the MA in Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Lahoud was the inaugural curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019). His work has also been presented in exhibitions such as Let’s Talk about the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis, Sursock Museum, Beirut (2016); Oslo Architecture Triennale: After Belonging (2016); and Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014).

• Thandi Loewenson (b.1989, Harare) is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations. Thandi is a Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art and Programme Lead of the MArch Design Practice. She is a co-founder of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE – an ‘act of creative solidarity’ which ‘resists definition with intent’ – formed at The Bartlett in 2018 to oppose the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality and the myriad frontiers of oppression present in architectural education and practice today. Thandi is also a contributor to EQUINET, the Regional Network on Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa, a co-founder of the Fiction, Feeling, Frame research collective at the Royal College of Art, and a co-curator of the open-access curriculum project Race, Space & Architecture.

• Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and architectural theorist. She is currently a Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, and has previously taught at the University of Manchester, University of Cape Town, the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She holds a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, for which she was awarded a RIBA Commendation Award for research, with undergraduate and Masters degrees in Architecture from the University of Cape Town. She has been a Mellon Fellow on the Canadian Centre for Architecture project, Centring Africa (2020 – 2022), a Graham Foundation Grantee holder (2022; 2023) and received the Scott Opler Award for Emerging Scholars (2019). Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent and global south. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Race, Space & Architecture, and lead curator and project manager of the pan-African digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness. She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along east African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.

Image Credit: Paul Adejo, MArch Design Practice, Royal College of Art 24/25

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