Phathutshedzo Nevhungoni

Mavu /ɛmˈeɪˈviˈju/ [MA-VU] – “Soil” in Tshivenda

Mavu is more than soil. It is memory, breath, inheritance.

It anchors us to those who walked before, with reverence and grace.

In Venda culture, soil is kin, not capital. It calls us to care, not to own.

Yet under globalisation, indigenous knowledge risks erosion.

Modernity, masked as progress, often silences oral traditions and sacred cosmologies.

What once animated the earth with meaning fades into forgetting.

This project emerges as both resistance and remedy.

It seeks to preserve, not in glass boxes,

but through a living architecture of memory.

At the basin of Lake Fundudzi, the building aspires to protect and to share.

It will house the gold held in indigenous knowledge

and pass it forward,

so future generations may not only remember

but re-member themselves

in relation to land, to language, to lineage