Cassandra Adjei

About

I am Cassandra Adjei, based in London, developing a practice informed by architectural education,  while reaching beyond its traditional remit. This expands to research, writing, and art practice to engage in associative experiments in space making.  

+ 447466836735 redraws lines of thinking to include maligned practices, peoples, and operations. In this case, the illicit drug economy, modern slavery, and racialisation. I believe there is creative potential in examining spatial relationships within complex social dynamics. By starting at a baseline of the illegal, immoral, and unjust, I think beyond, through and with; beyond beration, through pain and with empathy. 

County Lines is a phenomenon of the British illicit drugs economy, where Class A drugs are trafficked by vulnerable people from urban to rural areas. In these landscapes, across these lines, we try to find the intrepid figure who has been forgotten. She knows harm and exploitation but is not defined by it. To find her and reanimate her existence, we traverse boundaries traced by colonial, capital and technological forces, alchemizing soul, sense and scapes. 

The work is a process, spatially articulated as a journey. One that starts in the darkness of the necropolis and continues into the darkness of a dream. A dream is the ideal space to communicate entanglement. It is a site of physical and psychological ablation, removed from space and time itself. In a dreamscape, every dimension of reality is dematerialised, so as we depart from rationality, we enter ‘the sensory amalgam, where the sensory is the gateway to an architectural imaginary. 

On this journey she starts her carriage not by boat, but by coach, car and train. She departs her inner city homeland, leaving the estate block phasing in an out of illuminated convenience stores, petrol stations, bus stops, and street lights. She is an explorer in the urban star scape of synthetic illumination, then crash lands into a rural farland. She enters a bucolic space, where her blackness is no longer a sheath of obscurity but a marker for anomaly. Her presence within these historic coastal English Counties, as a modern-day slave invokes a discomfort that reveals the tensions of post-colonial legacies, placing what once travelled transatlantic distances, existed in colonies, only visible outwards from the edges of the land, directly into the landscape – despoiling it. 

In her eventual passage to the dreamscape, she enters a dysmorphic terrain. Grains of compacted geographies, mythologies and testimonies. A place to share new narratives, forge new routes and build new bonds.