Qamelliah Nassir

About

Qamelliah Nassir is spatial designer and storyteller from Tanzania. Her practice is defined by themes of home, belonging, identity through the eyes of Muslim women.

Weaving language, material experiments and visual media her projects have remained focused on the Architecture of Openness. An architecture of delicate thinness, an architecture of translucency, fragile yet resilient.

From the Majlis to the Kanga, her designs heavily reference the everyday rituals and objects used to in constructing and reconstructing identity to overcome systems and structures, both within her home-land, Tanzania and her host-land, the UK. She believes in the potential of working with the migratory, the diasporic, the domestic, the performative and the narrative in order to create new sets of architectural conventions, giving material and spatial meaning to the themes. Her work focuses on empowering stories from marginalised voices, offering up rich and provocative possibilities for being in and making space, both at home and on the journey.

This year her work with design studio ADS9, 15,000 Kangas, was situated within her homeland, Tanzania.

The Kanga is a rectangular cloth composed of a wide printed border and a single printed sentence. It is an integral part of daily life, used as a form of modest dress, an apron in the kitchen newborns are wrapped in a new pair and delivered into the arms of the mother, and the dead are buried, wrapped in 6 pairs of kanga.

From the scale of the body to the horizon, 15,000 Kangas carrying centuries of East African history and tradition unfold into an intimate, interpersonal and public space. The long spanning length measures the distance between the homes of locals, and their seaweed farms, delineating the line between architecture and horizon.

Designed to be as densely populated or scarcely occupied, the building offers an alternative form of inhibition.

How can the space exist somewhere between kanga/building/landscape?

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Qamelliah is currently at Ryder Architecture, working across scales and sectors. With a diverse portfolio of international and local projects while working at practices such as BIG and Napper Architects, she aims to continue to tackle political, social and ecological questions that surround architectural practice.