Jos Boys has been a life-long design activist. She is co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, an informal platform bringing together disabled artists with built environment educators and practitioners to critically and creatively re-think access and inclusion. Originally trained in architecture, Jos was co-founder of Matrix feminist design co-operative in London UK in the 1980s, and has also been a journalist, researcher, consultant, educator and artist. Jos’s work centres on co-developing creative interventions that challenge norms about who gets valued and who doesn't (in society, in the design of built space and in architecture as a discipline).
In a built world where land and property are so often treated as financial assets, my curated collection for the 2025 Open House Festival celebrates groups and projects that value alternative ways of living, working and learning, beyond the profit motive. These– often small-scale and hard-won - moments of resistance and renewal have been collectively created across time and space, mainly by and for those disenfranchised by conventional capitalist norms. Many such radical places have since disappeared and left only traces; while some continue to creatively adapt to changing social, economic and political circumstances. For me, each project in this collection aims to reveal, as radical activist David Graeber put it, that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
