ellipses [Spatial Praxis] proposes a critical examination of architecture, urban planning, and spatial practices as it explores work on the fringes or beyond conventional norms. This special project establishes an editorial collective tasked with developing the publishing workflow for a new imprint structure. The publishing of this new imprint offers space for continued critical work on considerations of the built environment, through creative research/practice, and through innovative and critical writing practices.

Sarah de Villiers is an architectural researcher and designer, based in Johannesburg and Milan. Her practice, spaceKIOSK, works at the intersection of design, technology and trade. de Villiers’s work often involves collaboration with design research institutions and practices. She has recently worked with UCT and the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, as well as the African Futures Institute based in Accra. She has been an educator within Unit 18 and Unit 14 at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, and was also a cofounding director of design firm Counterspace. She has worked as an assistant curator on the exhibition team for the 18th International Architecture exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia (2023) and was also a tutor at the Biennale College Architettura 2023. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Nothando Lunga is a unit tutor at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), University of Johannesburg (UJ). In addition to her role in academia, she is a practising architect at Boogertman and Partners Architects, and she conducts research through her research practice, Freespace.Africa. Her research focuses on the intersections of identity, memory, race, and space in postcolonial African contexts, with an emphasis on everyday claims to space and the complexities of systems of oppression and racialised borders. She earned her master's degree in architecture from the GSA, UJ, where her thesis explored research-based practices using archives to highlight the violation of constitutional rights evident in public protests and evictions in post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa.

Zen Marie is an artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
 His practice and research engage video, film, photography, performance, and writing, using site-specific or relational processes to critically explore power relations within spaces. Marie holds a doctorate of philosophy in fine art from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), an MA in cultural analysis from the University of Amsterdam (with distinction) a bachelor’s of arts in fine art from the University of Cape Town (with distinction) and is a past participant of the prestigious 'de ateliers' program in Amsterdam. Marie is head of the department of fine art, where he has taught since his appointment in 2009.

Naadira Patel is an artist, and designer based in Johannesburg. She leads softwork, an interdisciplinary art and design practice working within an ecosystem of designers and makers across the fields of art, architecture, and design. Her practice is research-oriented, experimental, collaborative, and speculative. Naadira holds a research master's in cultural analysis from the University of Amsterdam, and has lectured at the Wits School of Arts, and in Unit 18 and Unit 24 at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg. Recent projects include design collaborations with wolff Architects, the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) and Frame45, working with the design and curatorial team of the 18th Biennale Architettura 2023, The Laboratory of the Future; African Futures Institute; Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA); Zietz MOCAA; Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF); African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF); Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI); Black Beyond Data; Association for Women in Development (AWID), and most recently the South African Pavilion for the Biennale Arte 2024, amongst others.

Brigitta Stone-Johnson is an architect, artist, practice-based researcher, and lecturer in Wits School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP). She is an interdisciplinary practitioner, working in various media, from photography, drawings, mixed media, and installations. Her focus is on creative practices as tools for knowing and working with the material agencies of urban terrains in post-extractivist urban contexts. She works with Rubble and Stone.

Tamara Tesoriero is a researcher, writer, and digital artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has served as the ellipses [...] digital editor since the 2022 publication cycle for Issue IV: Architectures of the South and is pursuing her master’s degree in digital arts. Her master’s dissertation, which explores interactive digital media and publication, further fueled her interest in the digital environment as a participatory, immersive, and archival space for cultural production and distribution.

Huda Tayob is a South African architect and architectural historian, currently based at the Royal College of Art, London. Her research focuses on minor, migrant, and subaltern architectures and questions how we might productively respond to archival silences and the associated violence of architectural archives. She is cocurator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and cocurator of the digital podcast series and online exhibition, the Archive of Forgetfulness. She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with Index of Edges, a tracing of watery archives, methods and stories along east African coasts from Cape Town to Port Said.

Manijeh Verghese is the director of Sphere Spaces, a design and curatorial practice interested in widening access to who can participate in conversations about architecture and culture. Verghese was cocurator of The Garden of Privatised Delights, the 2021 British Pavilion at the 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale and was the interpretation specialist for the South Asia Gallery at the Manchester Museum in partnership with the British Museum that was cocurated by a collective of over 30 local experts. She is the head of public engagement at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, where she also teaches the design studio Diploma Unit 12. She is currently one of the Mayor of London’s Design Advocates and an External Examiner for the MArch program at The Bartlett, UCL. She is on the board of trustees for the Architecture Foundation and a member of the advisory board for The DisOrdinary Architecture Project.

Stefan Winter, philosopher and author, is honorary professor for artistic research at Film University Babelsberg (Germany) and visiting professor at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning in Johannesburg, South Africa. He served as representative of Germany in the Management Committee of the European Forum for Advanced Practices. In his research and teaching at universities and art schools in Basel, Berlin, Bochum, Braunschweig, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Perugia and Potsdam, he traverses and connects artistic and scientific knowledge cultures.

ellipses [...] is a digital platform, founded in 2015 at Wits School of Arts, that seeks to develop and disseminate forms of knowledge that are either on the edges of or totally omitted from disciplinary norms or conventional scholarship. Initially responding to the problematics of creative research within the South African Higher education knowledge economy, the platform has gone beyond this to explore omissions or silences in broader and more varied senses.