THE ARCHITECTURE OF BELONGING: In-Between A public event series by STIR x ROCA Gallery London, in partnership with London Festival of Architecture 2026
Four practitioners. One question: what does it mean to belong? Architecture, film, art & performance meet at the threshold.
Many of us find ourselves living in threshold states — between cultures, between cities, between the identities we inherit and the ones we build. In-Between is not a condition of absence. It is where some of the most urgent spatial and cultural thinking is happening right now. For the first session of The Architecture of Belonging, we bring together four diverse creative practitioners across architecture, curatorship, filmmaking, art and performance, each working at the edges of their discipline, each speaking from and about the spaces that fall between belonging and exclusion, memory and erasure, arrival and home.
Through a series of short monologues followed by open conversation, the session asks: what does it mean to belong and what does the architecture of belonging look like. Whose stories get housed in our institutions, our streets, our cities and our memories, and how?
Speakers:
Sahra Hersi: Artist & Spatial Designer Jim Stephenson: Architectural Photographer & Filmmaker Adam Kaasa: Scholar, Artist & Performer Manijeh Varghese: Architect, Curator, and CEO, Open City Chaired by: Samta Nadeem, Curatorial Director, STIR