Who is ISSI_ISSA? Just one of the many digital identities designed by Ilze Mari Wessels - balancing between a real physical person and a digital dialogue with the self and other artists. The practice of navigating socio-political cultural narratives through intersections of language & form is ongoing through the work. ISSA is a digital nickname used to undermine her Afrikaans and European heritage so engrained in the damages of a country - the popular cultural erasure of Ilze for the purpose of a planetary existence - while ISSI silently celebrates that which cannot be erased, as an Afrikaans word that describes 'to not be' , the name ISSI_ISSA exists as not a name, but rather a method to sincerely celebrate the poetics of a South African White Woman with a poetic and artistic Afrikaans heritage of her own and specifically again yet finally the name stands as the portal and praise to the digital world in which we can be and not be - whoever we wish to be. Ilze, an architect and self-taught artist experimenting with digital-dialogue landscapes as forms of situational & hegemonic typologies for unlocking boundary narratives of the segretated states of South Africa. Based on research regarding how the presence of the digital within the architectural context of South Africa might pivot political and patriarchal problematic places their art exist as the final format of these experiments and are envisioned as portals to the spaces virtualised in digital darkness - with a sale allowing more light to be installed towards addressing the context of planetary conditions collectively experienced as undergoings of being alive. ISSI_ISSA is to be understood as a simultaneous recognition and denial of an Afrikaans heritage, translated as ‘Is not Issa. [‘is nie-Issa)’ The name also commemorates the magical reality of the avatar to act as its own disruptive linguistic tool, 'landmarking' how identity/language can dismantle institutional constructions; as explored in Floating Reveries ‘14 vases’ 2018 and through the development of other fictional institutional sites of collaborative culture ranging from 'Otynet' to ‘The Department for Urban Sanity'. This flotsam of practices hopes to playfully critique architectural methods of form making and design, which as it stands remains a sorrowful testament to the homogenous error of the unsettling grasp the stagnation of apartheid stills holds over South African society/builds/space - exemplified in the non-dialogue topic of the same model of 'rdp' house still replicating itself through the land still not returned to the People and as a model of whiteness and its business model of established error not fully accounted for. In 2019 the founding of 'Is Sound Architectures' in collaboration with the Goethe Institute was where 'OtyNet' began as a service for cultural dialogue to expand online/offline cultural spaces at the peripheries of urban and digital access sites to explore junctions between creative industries and 'waste architectures'(2016) by working with organisations like Pretoria Street Photographers, The Capital Arts Revolution, The Social Life of Waste Art, The Makers Valley Collective, Fanakalo Tours, Basile Arts, The African Reclaimers Organisation and Corobrik to 'Online' artists by 'Tethering' [sound] architecture* to the 'Youth' through Network in dialogue which eventually saw the birthing of the most recent collaborative endeavor, the Womb_anifesto. [2020/21] Partnering with organisations to digitally disrupt stagnation in dialogue & thus realise a virtualised network of an 'internet of People' in a country where the data doesn't really allow for the currency of digital to be accessed as we know it to be accessed from the pedestals of privilege. The deconstruction is underway - it just looks very different to what everyone imagined - plus - it seems to be a secret garden party - best be getting invited. What kind of art is this ? Continuously inspired by deep dimensions of life & virtual realities taking hold in realised architectures of the everyday; aspects like the uncanny valley, futuristic linguistics and mundane memories of the meta - practice and their work focuses on the context of digital futures in collaboration with sites of political entanglement - attempting thus to decipher an architectural methodology embedded within site & sound surrounding social conflicts in cities. The work seeks to actualise matter/material of dialogue to begin defending a new system of ‘Communicationism’ in response to broken systems and the forgotten methods of Life. Dialogue as the lesser represented 'building block' of architectural practices in a world avoiding the reckoning of deconstructing sites beyond anything more than theory is explored and presented by embedding perceived impermanent elements into image, structure, sound and social media by specifically adding augmented realities/hashtag portals to each object/art form as a reiteration of an ‘anti-Monument’ through mimicking deep learning speculations. Although dialogue in nature is of the multiple, the work always inevitably arcs at an individual interpretation; everything from the archive of hashtags to lexicons of stl files, attempts to exist as accessible structures for the development of a network memory so as to sustain the disruption of systematic mechanisms that remain unresolved in current spaces of the digital and living spaces, ultimately recognizing the creative power of destruction itself and its connection to our undeniable human nature in light of multiple sustainable crisis’ which we now finally find ourselves staring at - and being affected by more directly than ever before. This prototyping of ‘art as platform’ for the furthering of communication through augmentation of medium is to be understood as foundational groundwork for developing borderless gateways towards ‘sound’ architectures in lieu of automation and artificial theories filtering through our everyday technologies and into the integration of digital worlds within the reality of the everyday. Issi_Issa dreams of restoring 'Sanity' to site through the unpacking of dialogue and its mass expressed through a series of ongoing installations across places in Johannesburg - that then embed themselves into analoguous digital images for visual and audial consumption in the format of NFTS structured as 'flags' and 'forms' - aka JPEGS and STLS.