Disruptive Nostalgia is a transnational collective dedicated to reimagining and critically challenging the narratives embedded within architecture, landscape, and cultural memory. Their practice is deeply informed by intersectional politics, leveraging a constellation of expertise to investigate how memory is formed, contested, and transformed. The collective comprises Lesego, Frederick, Chris, and Miliswa; artists, designers, and researchers rooted in South Africa, Lebanon, the Netherlands, and the UK. Their shared toolkit spans architecture, landscape architecture, digital archiving, machine learning, indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling, queer perspectives, and ecological research.
In response to the climate emergency, Disruptive Nostalgia examines the material archives of urban and natural environments, seeking to spark new forms of solidarity in the more-than-human world. During their residency at Berlin’s Spreepark, they identified one enduring constant: change. They catalogued the park’s continuous transformation—from the shifting states of its iconic rides, to the relentless reclamation by the natural landscape, to the evolving myths and narratives that have surrounded the site since its inception. This documentation of flux becomes a foundational archive for their work.
Their exhibition installation, “The Belly of the Beast,” manifests this focus on transformation. The work channels the park's layered history into an immersive, participatory environment that feels like a living archive itself. The collective constructs a journey that mirrors the enticement and disorientation of Spreepark’s legendary Spreeblitz ride. The installation invites visitors to step into a fantastical landscape where interactive panels, tactile toys, and masks make play a form of critical inquiry. Here, the collective’s research on change is translated into an experience that questions how stories about a place are built, decay, and are reborn. Disruptive Nostalgia thus creates spaces where memory is not a fixed record, but an active, participatory process of myth-making, offering new narratives of resilience, entanglement, and perpetual becoming.
Lesego Bantsheng is an urban designer, landscape architect and researcher - founder and lead of the non-profit collective Rural Futurisms. Working in rural northern South Africa and internationally, as urban designer at Maccreanor Lavington in Rotterdam and as contributor at Matri-Archi(tecture), Bantsheng challenges conventional notions of landscape and architecture, exposing rural-urban binaries.
Her practice emphasises probiotic design methodologies: rather than imposing design, she prioritises listening - to the land, to local communities, to inherited cosmologies - and works collaboratively to shape space and materiality from the ground up. Lesego explores complex aggregations and collaborations between humans and non-humans, envisioning a futurescape of co-habitation.
A catalytic project in Bantsheng’s trajectory is Rural Futurism’s pilot project in Makgobistad - a community-led exploration of geological, biological, and social artefacts and their material and morphological implications. Bantsheng’s work integrates archival, conversational, and community-centred outputs: material libraries, workshops, participatory research, and frameworks for rural futures anchored in heritage, ecology, and social agency.
www.ruralfuturisms.org
Chris Tegho is a multidisciplinary artist and creative technologist working between Lebanon and the UK. Their practice moves across technology, movement and play. They explore how technology shapes identity and perception, and they use movement and play to connect, experiment and expand our perspectives. Their practice is driven by questions of queer belonging and a need to build ecosystems that hold multiplicity and difference. Themes of belonging, inner tension, chaos, and care surface repeatedly through participatory formats that invite collective authorship.
They have collaborated on immersive installations with numerous artists including Jazmin Morris, such as TRex Dreams of Mangoes and Figs, which explores technological access, waiting, and consciousness in digital spaces, and with Zach Blas on projects such as Cultus, Profundior, and The Doors. These works examine human–machine relations, consciousness, and AI religiosity, while questioning the extractive data practices underpinning contemporary AI systems.
www.christegho.info
Frederick Kannemeyer is a South African–trained architect with experience in architectural practice, spatial research, and design-led collaboration. He’s particularly interested in research-driven methodologies, including archiving, mapping, curation, and documentation, and has collaborated with sociologists and anthropologists to integrate social analysis into spatial design(both physical and digital). His practice is grounded in storytelling, cultural sensitivity, and a critical engagement with history and place.
Frederick holds an MTech in Architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg (2019) and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies degree from the University of Cape Town (2016). During his studies, he challenged, subverted and expanded his definition of what architecture and space-making can be and continues to explore this in his work. He currently lives and works in London.
www.yourboyfred.com
Miliswa Ndziba is a worldbuilder and architect based out of Kwa-Zulu in southern Africa. She defines architecture as the practice of manifesting personal and collective fantasy through space-making.
She co-founded the architecture collective room19isaFactory. and the ritual homeware and objects studio What Has Two Eyes and Too Many Ears?. Her work is particularly interested in challenging the continued construction of spatio-political utopias, using world-building techniques like child-play and what African American feminist writer Saidiya Hartman terms "critical fabulation."
After graduating from the Graduate School of Architecture in 2021, she began exploring mycelium as both a material and a narrative device for speculative mapping. This research continues with the Bio Art - Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at VIAD, where she investigates the use of microbes like mycelium and mould to model new spatial futures—including the natural degradation of protected colonial structures in southern Africa.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Situated Making, SYM|BIO|ART, and Imminent and Eminent Ecologies at the University of Johannesburg's FADA Gallery between 2022 and 2024. Her piece in the Imminent and Eminent Ecologies show was featured in the twenty-fifth issue of ARTAFRICA Magazine.
www.seemiliswaplay.com