Negative Space, a Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa

Beckett takes a rich yet little-known African Modernist tradition as a point of departure for his work Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa (2015). It consists of an automated storage and retrieval machine (such as those used in warehouses and pharmacies), reconfigured to arrange wooden building blocks to create portraits of specific Modernist buildings across Africa. These small models, however, reference not the actual buildings, but rather their negative spaces, alluding to the buildings’ potential for illegal expansion of living or workspaces.