As part of our ongoing research with c/o Dakar curator Nzinga B. Mboup, now in it’s final year, we have formed a new collaboration with the University of Toronto Daniels School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and its students.

Drawing on the networks, testimonies, and fieldwork developed through the c/o program’s research, the summer school aims to become a space for ongoing knowledge transmission and material experimentation. The goal is to offer an educational framework for exploring and appropriating bioclimatic and non-extractive construction alternatives by immersion and study in the local ecosystems and heritage of Senegal. The buildings techniques of interest are ceramic bricks, fibres, stone masonry and shells as building materials. The students will investigate these various material traditions exemplified by architectural precedents through research and an immersion in the cultural, territorial and technological ecosystem that produced them. They will reflect on the current condition and sustainability and start to think about how these new methodologies and approaches can be re-activated and reappropriated through contemporary approaches to architecture and construction beyond the Senegalese context.

This workshop process will encourage students to rethink their relationship to materials, territory, and labour, and generate new perspectives and tools that respond to and inscribe themselves within the contemporary realities of Senegal.