Drawing on the vast global worlds encountered along east African coastal cities, Index of Edges illuminates the deep historical knowledge of living with and along seas. In response to climate change resulting in increasing coastal erosion, rapid sea level rise, and high levels of coastal pollution, this exhibition gathers sites, stories, and approaches which collectively point to alternative coastal futures. An index is not a map—rather than delineating boundaries it gathers people, repositions histories and draws out significance. In the Index of Edges, sites, and stories of deep and near futures are drawn into adjacency. Tracing indexical points along the coast from the first century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and eighteenth-century Dalrymple’s Nautical charts, to contemporary coastal data and continued ways of living with watery intimacies, is an attempt to recognize the ebb and flow of edge conditions, despite violence and catastrophe. This index traces the accumulation of embodied detritus of layered pasts through an excess of specificities which collates stories of site and temporality, archival and present. This is work towards a relational, situated, and material axis where precarity and possibility meet at the shore; where global empires coincide with fishing villages; and where beyond danger and precarity, the coast is a site of joy and sustenance.

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural theorist and curator, based at the University of Manchester, with a doctorate from the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is Canadian Centre for Architecture Mellon Fellow (2020–22), recipient of the Scott Opler Award for emerging scholars (2019), and a Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) Awardee for her PhD Research. She is co-curator of the open-access curriculum Racespacearchiteture.org and lead curator of the pan-African digital exhibition the Archive of Forgetfulness. She has published widely and regularly lectures at leading universities in the United Kingdom and globally including Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022), Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) (2022), University of Edinburgh (2022), and Royal College of Arts (2022).