HUMAN-CENTRED STUDIO: 

CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE THROUGH PERFORMANCE DESIGN

Studio leaders: Studio leaders: Janri Barker & Bongisa Msutu

This design project explores the intersection of performance design, critical spatial practice, and spatial justice. Students will collaborate with the Feast of Clowns Festival, centred around Burgers Park in Pretoria CBD, to create scenographic interventions that activate urban spaces. Narrative formats such as movies, books, prose, and documentary films will be used as creative prompts.

The project investigates the tensions between permanence and temporality that characterise fictional narratives, the Pretoria CBD and festivals. Students will identify spatial justice themes from the selected texts and media and translate these into performative design strategies. Through critical walking practices in Pretoria's inner city, students will conduct embodied spatial research to identify potential intervention sites that resonate with the spatial narratives explored in the chosen media. 

This speculative design project will align with the DEFSA student design competition brief and ask: What if design could bridge fictional and physical geographies? What if temporary performance could transform vacant "scars" in the urban fabric into sites of collective memory and alternative futures? What if scenographic interventions could make the city's hidden spatial possibilities visible?

 Students will develop performance spaces, creating a symbiotic relationship between permanent host structures and temporary interventions in Burgers Park. The outcomes will include prototypes demonstrating how performance design can serve as a form of critical spatial practice that questions existing power structures embedded in space while proposing alternative spatial interventions that promote justice and inclusion. 

By engaging with fictional representations of space and Burger Park’s concrete urban reality, the project encourages students to see design as a playful, experimental and transformative tool for imagining and materialising spatial futures we have yet to conceive.