Protoscape
A conversation between a gallery and a design studio — bridging ways of thinking often kept apart.
What emerged is neither a product nor an artwork, but a spatial system: modular, mobile, and continuously reconfigured by the spaces it enters and the publics it encounters.
Curatorial intent and design intelligence operate together, transforming exhibition space from a neutral container into an activated field.
RMB LATITUDES
ART FAIR
JOHANNESBURG
2024
Closer to a prototype than a finished work, and moving across exhibitions, art fairs, and public activations, Protoscape exists as a set of archival artefacts layered with the traces of context, encounter, and collective presence.
Rather than presenting sculpture as something to be viewed from a distance, Protoscape proposes an alternative condition: seating as sculpture, sculpture as infrastructure, infrastructure as a prompt for gathering.
It doesn't resolve itself;
it learns where it lands.
ISENZO SAK'DALA
CAPE TOWN
2024
Seen through iSenzo Sak'dala, a group exhibition produced by FEDE in collaboration with RESERVOIR, Protoscape operates simultaneously as artwork and exhibition infrastructure.
Drawing from Nguni aesthetic values — where creative expression is inseparable from the crafting of functional goods — the installation engages natural materials and rigorous geometry while reflecting the material culture of contemporary South African urban life. In this context, the work contributes to a wider inquiry into how indigenous methodologies have always been dynamic: responsive to circumstance, adaptive by necessity, and capable of producing beauty through function.
Across different iterations, Protoscape integrates practices often treated as discrete: sculpture, curation, design, exhibition-making, tactical urbanism, and programming.
GIBELA
CAPE TOWN
2025
BREE STREET PICNIC
CAPE TOWN
2025
The project's movement beyond the gallery extends this inquiry. As part of the Bree Street Picnic, in collaboration with THE MAAK and Faith Shields, Protoscape enters the urban environment as a civic gesture. Installed in a context shaped by car-centric planning and uneven access to public space, the work facilitates moments of comfort, gathering, and pause. In a city where public space is often heavily regulated or informally policed, the act of being comfortable being together becomes a quiet but pointed form of resistance — proposing an alternative model of spatial hospitality.
To encounter Protoscape is to
enter an ongoing movement
Each configuration is provisional, shaped by the conditions of its arrival and the behaviours it invites. In this way, the project embodies FEDE Studio's wider methodology: a practice that resists fixed boundaries, holds art and design in productive tension, and understands cultural work as something lived into over time.
Protoscape treats space as relational, objects as active participants, and audiences as co-authors. What the work offers is not a conclusion, but an invitation: to sit, to gather, to listen, and to imagine how shared space might be otherwise.
MARSHALLTOWN
JOHANNESBURG
2026