About

Mmakhotso Lamola [she/her] is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer and spatial practitioner based in Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the University of Cape Town, where she completed her M.Arch masters in architecture.

Her work avails itself of the immersive interstitial spaces of disciplines, unfolding through a vulnerable process-based research praxis. Here, she investigates the emotional landscapes that constitute urban space, where she attempts to forge new modes of archiving to create more personal, softer narratives about cities. She interrogates what she has termed the “invisible city” which is intangible, spiritual, atmospheric and emotional – to understand how we belong and cultivate agency in our various spaces. Lamola explores this phenomenon by examining the histories of both well-documented and lesser-known narratives, to unearth a complex and rich understanding of what it means to be a part of cities, landscapes and communities.

She produces modes of research that replace the impulse to discover with the impetus to recover, heal, listen, and give voice to the silenced; in this way she aims to complicate what seems simple and advocate for vulnerability above all else. Her projects are explorations of how one can find new languages to describe the city so that everyone can enter into its spatial dialogue equally, particularly in post-colonial contexts.

Lamola has been an artist in residence and participant at the New Dimensions Lab, hosted by Electric South (2024), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2022), Pogon Jedinstvo Zagreb Centre(2022), The Institute of Creative Arts Fellowship (2020), Residency 11:11 (2020), Grigri Pixel Residency by MediaLab Prado (2018), and The Centre for the Less Good Idea (2017). Her poetry has been published in the New Landscapes Anthology, as well as Visions of Home, both published by Lungs Project. Her writing has been featured in the Summer Flowers Pumflet and Hophuis Pumflet, published by Wolff Architects. She is the founder and curator of the mobile workshop The Belonging Collective Archive. Currently (2024), she was recently the recipient of the Prince Claus Building Beyond Cycle 3 Mentorship Programme where she explored her current project A Map Home.