Everyday between Cape Town and Johannesburg roughly 1,500 freight and heavy-goods trucks transport everything from individual online shopping purchases to agricultural equipment. These material goods and stocks, expended energy and labour – run as tangible yet unperceived counterparts to the flows of the stock market and consumption practices. ‘Assembling Lines’ inserts into the lush green landscape the rudimentary language of LED screens and stock market updates, reflecting on practices of extraction, production, distribution and trade at a time when net zero narratives risk being sidelined as abstractions.

Naadira Patel is an artist, designer and educator who leads Johannesburg-based research and design practice Softwork Studio. At the intersection of design, visual art, feminist practice and technology, Patel works collaboratively with artists, architects, feminist and queer organisers and cultural programmers. Patel’s practice centres on the politics of image-making, with a focus on spatialisation and imaging of social and political practice. Patel holds a research Master’s Degree in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam, and has lectured at the Wits School of Arts, and the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg.

Sarah de Villiers is an architectural researcher and designer, based in Johannesburg and Milan. Her practice, spaceKIOSK, is an architecture and research studio that works at the intersection of design, technology and trade. She collaborates with design research institutions and practices, most recently through the African Futures Institute, as an educator at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and as research-illustrator at the Archive of Forgetfulness. She was a co-founding director of design firm Counterspace and holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand.

‍