What is belonging? Jayden Ali on the London Festival of Architecture 2026 theme

Belonging. The more I have sat with this year's London Festival of Architecture theme, the more I have realised that much of my life and work over the last decade has been shaped by precisely that search – for something I, at times, feel, and something I am continually looking for.

Architecture has given me the opportunity to work across many places, but London remains home. While much of what I share now is rooted here, projects, conversations and experiences come from beyond, from Venice, New York, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Places that have shaped my understanding of culture, exchange, memory and belonging.

These thoughts are also a reflection on London as a global city, a springboard and a place of encounter – a place where people, ideas, traditions and ambitions from around the world meet, overlap and evolve. A place that has provided the foundation for a practice that now works internationally, supported by studios here and in New York, and by collaborators, clients and communities across multiple continents. They are, in many ways, an expanded reflection on that search – on the qualities that make belonging possible.

Jayden Ali discusses the idea of belonging

I will start with a story from this year's Venice Art Biennale, where I found myself taking in Lubaina Himid's contribution to this year's British Pavilion. For those unfamiliar with the exhibition, Himid's presentation centred on painting. Large-scale works that reflected on memory, identity, movement and making, and which continued her decades-long exploration of Black life.

There was a strength to the ensemble of paintings born from the relatively solitary pursuit of mining a lifetime's vulnerability, resistance, experience, and observation to churn them into images of resilience on a vast scale. Multiple, high-saturation paintings, some 8m wide, offered a meditation on what curator and writer, and now Studio Museum in Harlem director, Thelma Golden, encourages us to focus on: ‘the way in which people make work’.

Despite the obvious skill needed to work at such a large scale, the work’s potency comes from inserting into the white void of Venice a vision not only of what could be, but of what is – a complexity embodied in the shifting of a predominant Euro-centric lens to bring into frame the obvious, but that which is often overlooked, that Black people make and have always made.

For me, this engagement with Lubaina's work frames a broader conversation about my own and an examination of some of the qualities that I think are critical to belonging – both for myself and for others:

• Reciprocal dialogues across time
• Multiple ways of making
• The reframing of ‘the centre’

In other words:

• Antiphony
• Polyphony
• Polycentrism

Antiphony

Recently, we [at JA Projects, founded by Jayden Ali] established a studio in New York, which currently covers North America and the Caribbean. The latter geography is a place where I am currently artistic director for an upcoming major theatrical performance.

It is a commission that has brought me into dialogue with the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Barbados' cultural north star, credited with helping give the island and its people a distinctly Caribbean voice rooted in a Black Atlantic sonic tradition – one where cadence, rhythm and performance are deployed in challenge to inherited power structures and imposed ways of speaking, writing and being.

Much of Brathwaite's writing is concerned with questions of arrival, becoming and belonging – questions shaped by a Caribbean history of displacement, migration and survival. And in his work The Arrivants, he has written about those who have come before us.

In my own Venice [Architecture Biennale] moment in 2023, I found myself actively tuning in to the presence of those who had occupied the British Pavilion before me. In addressing the neo-colonial building sitting within the Giardini – representing a nation whose wealth and influence were profoundly shaped by empire – I wanted to build upon how Black and Brown people had occupied space before.

In particular, my work Thunder and Simsek – the steel-pan sculptures that stood within the portico and were fabricated with Jamps and HS Design Studio – was inspired, in part, by Chris Ofili's intervention for the British Pavilion 20 years earlier, in which three flagpoles flew an artwork entitled Union Black. Both mine and Ofili's work were in dialogue and joined their mission to challenge institutions of power. My resonance to, and inspiration from, Ofili's work was an exercise in antiphony – call and response – which the scholar Paul Gilroy defined in his seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness as a principal formal feature of Black musical traditions.

Polyphony

At the studio, we are interested in collective living – in how people come together to build, maintain and continually remake our shared constructed world, which we understand to be constituted through both immaterial and material components: stories, rituals, performances, agreements and social contracts, as much as buildings, objects, infrastructures and landscapes. These domains are not separate, but mutually reinforcing.

If antiphony concerns itself with a dialogue across time, then it is the idea of polyphony that concerns itself with a dialogue across difference. Much of our work is about listening, seeing and feeling those expressions of difference with a view to understanding how architecture might create conditions in which they can continue to coexist, collide and occasionally find resonance with one another.

Within this, we are particularly interested in moments of cultural confluence. Much of that interest can be traced back to east London, where I grew up, and where, before I was an architect, I was a playworker. For a number of years, I worked at Cherry Trees School in east London, supporting children with complex behavioural needs through the construction of novel play environments – those powered by stories, sound and smoke, as much as by physical props like costumes.

My job was, in many ways, to challenge the power dynamics imposed upon these young people from an early age by the forces of society and the city. It required creative responses to entrenched ideas of exclusion, permission and access, but importantly it taught me to pay attention, acknowledge the contribution of others, be responsive and ‘build’ in the round. When I later studied at the Cass [the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University], in the Free Unit under Robert Mull, Catrina Beevor and Peter Carl, I found a similar spirit. The premise of the unit was that students could define their own interests and develop their own methodologies. Architecture was not presented as a fixed discipline. It remains the basis of how I practice and, also, how I teach.

Many of us creatives and those involved in architecture and planning know the excitement that comes with seeing an idea move from imagination into reality. My hope is that by embracing and designing for the full suite of spatial conditions, value can also be found in the exchange of knowledge and the building of collective confidence. That making becomes something expansive and empowering, challenging inherited assumptions about who gets to participate.

Polycentrism

More recently, two things coalesced at around the same time. The first was attending a conversation by J Kameron Carter at the Swiss Institute in New York as part of a public programme connected to Nolan Oswald Dennis' exhibition ‘overturns’.

The discussion reflected upon the distinction between a circle and an ellipse. The circle, with its single centre, became a way of thinking about systems organised around singular authority. The ellipse offered something different, a geometry structured through multiple points of focus.

Around the same time, I first encountered the text The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, in which Golden reflected upon the relationship between margin and centre. She wrote: 'Even though I feel that the whole margin/centre debate has been adequately theorised by cultural critics from bell hooks to a whole slate of poststructuralists, I think the salient debate, as we enter the 1990s, is going to be the debate of the centre of the margin… Nobody has adequately talked about the way in which the margin itself has become a hugely conflicted site.'

While reflecting on a different period in time, Golden's observation has stayed with me. Taken together, these two reflections prompted me to think differently about where our work sits in relation to power, authority and influence, and I enjoy it most when it challenges those distinctions.

In our studio, we are inspired by artists, architects and world builders who have acted in that spirit, opened up dialogue and brought collective reading in how we understand the world. It is an influence that has resulted in us overtly considering gathering as a type of infrastructure – ie, that the way the city can support the movement of knowledge and offer care, opportunity, solidarity and belonging is as important as the way more conventional infrastructures support the movement of people, water, energy and goods.

Much of my work and mission is driven by a desire to afford these softer forms of city-making the same seriousness that architecture has traditionally reserved for physical infrastructure. The quality of ‘belonging’ itself can be understood through this lens – as something that must be built, maintained and cared for over time, supported by a network of relationships, rituals, institutions and spaces that allow people to recognise themselves within a wider collective.

These conditions have always been relevant to architecture, yet this remains a disruptive proposition to systems that assume authority resides within established centres and flows outwards. Instead, it suggests something closer to polycentrism. That the centre depends upon your lens, and perhaps this is where antiphony (listening across time) and polyphony (listening across difference) ultimately lead.

Polycentrism asks us to recognise that neither history nor the present is organised around a single point of view. Cities are richer than that; London is richer than that. And belonging, I think, emerges through our capacity to recognise multiple centres of value, knowledge, meaning and influence existing simultaneously alongside one another.

The text is an edited version of Jayden Ali's Murray Lecture, kicking off the London Festival of Architecture 2026 through an exploration of the 2026 theme of 'Belonging', and delivered on 1 June 2026 at the London Centre