Aissata Balde

Aissata Balde, also known as Aisha Balde, was born in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, in 1992 and is an architectural master’s student at the University of Johannesburg. She is preoccupied with her own experience of migration to Johannesburg, of being thrown into a multifaceted new reality of cultures, tribes, languages and races. Her work is related to identity and migration, and seeks to examine people’s origins and boundaries, how these can be renegotiated and recontextualised in different socio-political environments. Balde is inspired to probe the fluid notions of territory and the spaces of the in-between through the making of architecture, using the power of communication, pattern, language and semantics to uncover new materials, new structures and territories for architectural exploration and exploitation.