Villa Serpentara Fellowship 2025

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk

*1995 in Johannesburg (ZAF)

Lives in Zurich (CH)

Section: Architecture

Vita

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk is an architectural researcher, designer and performer. At the centre of her practice is an interest in spatial storytelling and a commitment to spatial education. She is the founder of Matri-Archi(tecture), an association based between Switzerland and South Africa that hosts a network of spatial practitioners dedicated to developing African spatial education, offering a site for artistic collaboration through design, art and architectural research projects. She is a doctoral fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich, focusing on understanding safe space in spatial terms in relation to gender-based violence. Through her multidisciplinary artistic approach, Khensani finds educational value in spatial, written and auditory explorations. Her primary medium is collage.

Residency

Through her longstanding research, Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk has investigated how architecture is implicated in our understanding of safe space and gender-based violence (GBV). Since 2023, through her doctoral fellowship, she has been focusing on “Third World Women” forms of kinship in Zürich since the 1970s, unearthing and accounting for the careful and caring ways in which foreign African diasporic women have constructed a culture of belonging in Zürich. At Serpentara, she will meticulously reflect on the conversations and exchanges she has had with “Third World Women” survivors of GBV in Zürich, working through textual, audio and visual materials. Combined with archival materials in a similar medium, Khensani will produce a collection of collages that reckon with the realities of urgency and desire all at once occurring in the social construction of safe spaces.

Scroll