Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski: Loudreading Post-Colonial Imaginaries (February 3, 2021)

welcome everyone to tonight's lecture uh part of science lecture series in the spring 2021. um tonight we have cruz garcia and natalie frankowski joining us they founded their office way architecture think tank in 2008 and they teach at virginia tech and that's where they are right now and they also teach at university of illinois and um and before that they did several fellowships at taliesin university of nebraska and carnegie mellon their their work constitutes a project much more than an office or a practice by design they crush the cross genres and modes of communication in everything they do but always everything flows from position pieces or manifestos the w-a-i and their name stands i think correct me if i'm wrong but it stands i think for what about it which might mean why should i care uh or why do you care or so what a way of communicating their critical approach to everything they do they present as contentious indignant maybe although they shroud this within romanticism and otherworldly descriptions of landscapes and jungles surrealist scenes and pure sometimes monumental forms littered across oppositional backgrounds most importantly they become their own entourage in the scenes like traveling bards or speakers the overall effect is one may be closer to poetry or happenings from the early 70s than to architectural rhetoric although it sometimes um draws us back to the early writings of rem kolhas and certainly super studio from that time their words against colonial and racist architectural culture are woven into their work but they do not explain it their use of platonic forms almost exclusively although they speak about the lores as a larger aesthetic category is not explained by their social and political agenda which is interesting there's a gap i think that today when there is growing interest in upending the politics of architecture and undoing its systemic exclusions and exploitations this kind of gap will be crucial to sustain the discussion developing a new generation of practices from this time practices that endure not only in the words they say but in the objects they produce will require gaps to keep the momentum crews and natalie's pure platonic shapes with their rendition in black veined marble stone or chain link appear on stages and in landscapes as a kind of misdirection or gap the purism might actually seem antithetical to their target as they seem to call out to laker woozier's primitives playing under the sun or maybe to an act of cultural appropriation where pyramid shapes might belong to black labor as charles davis ii mentioned yesterday at psyarc in his black lives matter week of action talk or maybe the authors are quoting minimalism but without the orthodoxy of michael freed's object hood rather in full theatrical rendition it's just left unexplained george kubler in his book the shape of time talks about what he calls the typology of artists lives which also refers to architects lives it's pretty riveting if a little dated he lays out five kinds of careers one precursors two obsessives three evangelists four ruminatives and five rebels precursors are those who quietly lay new foundations within an old preserve the precursor can have no imitators and their work begins at the ground level we often don't know how unique they are until history is mapped out later the obsessives live inside their intense complete imaginary reality and work in a bubble unperturbed by outside events evangelists are in contrast on a mission to improve the visible world by the imposition of their own sensibility ruminatives look at precedent and build on precedent adding previously unknown elements to a formal terrain like finding new features on a map finally rebels unlike precursors shaped their lives on the fringes of the society they despise forming a new civil condition kubler writes that they appear in crowds because the the way of the rebel is easily imitated no creator is just one of these it is like the diagnostic and statistical manual in psychology where a patient's psychological profile consists of a dominant condition with a set of features from other conditions attached to it so if i can lay them on a couch on the on the couch for a second i'd say that cruz and natalie are probably on the spectrum of rebel with ruminative features and i'd love to hear what you guys think about that maybe later uh many successful architects of the 20th century made their mark as evangelists in a mode of salesmanship and grand vision maybe this century or at least the next decade will be more about rebellion and the imaginary something we know architecture often returns to for a time in the meantime architecture will keep landing on the earth and we as architects need to find ways to connect the imaginary to the concrete or our role in society will quickly be reduced to commentary with that i'd like to invite cruz and natalie to the lectern so to say welcome thank you very much tom this uh i have to say is i think it's a beautiful introduction perhaps one of the most beautiful introductions we ever had um and uh i had to also confess you know it's the first time we meet online and it's a i mean it's a it's nice to hear uh your analysis of um of our practice we're happy to be here virtually even if it's not uh in person and and just looking at the events that are happening in the inside this week and the fact that we are in black history month and uh and that win 2021 after a really in the fastest year it makes us wonder if there's a there's space for that rebellion that tom was mentioning and if things are changing um you know if academic institutions are changing and if there's a new opening up to to a different type of critical discourse that has been different than the ones that we have seen at least in architectural environments before um and and you know in in that tune we we would like to start to talk about the first part so the talk is divided in four parts the first one is about clinical narrative and we have a short quote by peter slaughterdeg the fully developed ability to say no is also the only valid background for yes and only through both does real freedom begin to take form and in this capacity of the definition of consent if we want to participate or not of of certain discussions we of course want to identify with uh with that spirit of change right without being uh sort of reduced to a caricature of what means to be uh that image of the future attempt of of a struggling uh sort of a marginal group uh in architecture and and in this hope that things are changing uh sometimes i i i clash against reality right so i was listening to some of the lectures the uh of sayak recently and then i i i i put myself to the to some sort of perpetual cringe in the in the last few days as i listened to graham harman and sylvia lavine as this what i find kind of a tone-deaf type of question right in the head of black lives matter to ask do all objects matter equally it's kind of weird and the fact that graham harman spent some time of the lecture kind of defending why he was positioning with a nazi philosopher while sylvia lavine was standing in front of a house designed by a nazi it is kind of strange right that in the in this really historical time we're spending time talking about a house by peter eisenmann and showing really powerful moments in our history and kind of trying to explain what is art for them or not so sometimes i feel like i live in a different reality than most of architecture right and that's something that has to do with the institutions and has to do with the programs and with the ideas that we're exploring right so i don't know if i mean there are 700 views in this but if you watch it it is pretty cringy and to think that this was not done 30 years ago and that is actually happening in october of last year is kind of alarming right so we can be talking about do all objects matter equally well people are really dying in the streets because of black lives matter right because of uh the that sort of struggle to dignify life for that denial that architecture has been really uh kind of explicit in denying um understanding what is our condition today right like what are the forms that are manifesting this uh sort of necropolitical systems and uh and and what type of discourses do we need in order to be able to articulate this to make sense right uh about what we do and and the practices of thinking and designing and trying to imagine new worlds right what what vehicles do we have to understand the images that are unfolding before our own very eyes right uh the fact that uh when we see this can we understand what are we seeing with with with the with our architectural sort of uh preparation right with the with the uh sort of capacities that we try to have as designers right with all this a guy wearing the shoe shame and wearing all these sort of indigenous clothes or a guy standing with a confederate flag in front of the portrait of uh of charles summer that got beat up uh when he was trying to sort of uh uh challenge uh uh slavery uh in in certain states right in the in the you know this is a scene of of the the canning of charles summer so how how do we understand these images what apparatus do we have to understand this right and understand that this is not new right that this sort of uh systems that are kind of asphyxiating us are not something particular of the last four years or the last year but it's something that is really intrinsically embedded in political systems in ideological systems in pedagogical systems all around the world right like these are in one side we have trump and bolsonaro and the other uh head builders and marine le pen and a lot of the right-wing populists in europe uh understanding what is the relationship of architecture to this right that is really important for us as i remote back to that idea of the do all objects matter equally you know the question would be like do i have to listen to these people all the time do i have to be bombarded by all these architects that in in in search of that sort of uh possibility of doing more and more projects and hand-in-hand with neoliberalism as uh the the manifesto of br kings of jesus more acclaims will work with some of the most depictable people in the world right in the case of uh of gary bolsonaro here with a bunch of quotes uh racist calls against indigenous people in brazil right and understanding what is the relationship of this in architecture in a really straightforward way right understanding what what media do we have that is is that a possibility of being critical today to media right when when our mainstream platforms publish things like this you know from the people that brought us shuttle slavery and uh global uh uh sort of uh colonialism somebody trying to design a master planet to redesign earth right like understanding what where where do we draw the line and where do we stand in these new icons of colonialism right in the fact here elon musk when he was a question um if the what was not in the best interest was organizing a coup against eva morales in bolivia to which he replied he will coop whoever we want deal with it right uh so to give you a bit of background and why are we talking about this today is that we finished school in 2008 in a in a year kind of similar to 2020 a year of crisis uh uh two weeks after i arrived to europe uh lemon brothers filed for bankruptcy and that set the world of architecture but the war in general in some sort of a turmoil economically politically there was a rise of populism for the first 12 years of our practice we have lived in many different places because of this somehow we live in belgium where we met and we were where we found that our studio we live in the netherlands in france spent seven years in china and we've been uh china was a really important space not only uh because it was a culture where we can learn a lot from that we are not really accustomed to or that our sort of uh basic education doesn't provide tools to understand but also because we got to experience modernity right like that idea of modernism of that radical change of that idea of progress and development that is so questionable we got to leave it there right we just arrived after the olympics when the many cities in china were going through a drastic change and and we went from living in a city of 20 million people uh waking up the next day in the rolling hills of of wisconsin in the former home of frank lloyd wright where we became in 2016 visiting teaching fellows and what was striking and shocking about this was not only these landscapes and this sort of desolation right i was not used to live in the middle of nowhere surrounded by coyotes and nature in this way right for me nature was very unnatural um it was also having to deal with the legacy of an imaginary of american architecture but also an imaginary of the idea of architecture in a conventional way of that sort of singular male genius that is gonna transform the world right uh inhabiting these spaces that wouldn't have allowed people like us to be there right like when you see this picture of the of the you know that all white men sitting there in the table with many young white men around him designing the future of the world it's really striking right to the things that we stand for and the things that we're looking for in architecture right so once we were there we also not only working with our own project but in a way engaging with this legacy right and we did that through many different projects and many different interactions with different people and and many different approaches of our students that were trying also to question the legacy and the history of such a place right in a in a really critical time um these have a picture of a documentary and i always put it you see this this documentary that is so problematic in so many ways but just the title really captures those ideas that i'm trying to communicate right now right frank lloyd wright the man who built america so many things wrong with that statement right uh also understanding that even these institutions that are so precious in the imaginary of most of mo a lot of people they're also threatened by the same neo-liberal forces that are threatening education everywhere else right and understanding you know at this very same moment what is the relationship not only to that history but to other histories there are perhaps more pertinent and more contemporary right for us when we finish again in 2008 when we finished school and we started our professional life um it was the 40th year anniversary of 1968 right with the rebels of civil rights movement stonewall the the understanding also how that is not something that happened 40 years ago 50 years ago but that is even more urgent today right understanding that uh on the the questions if the pavement is under the the beaches under the pavement that was asked in paris in 68 is still quite similar to what the jill noir is asking today with a bunch of sub-saharan uh workers uh are protesting for a dignified right to uh to life right and to work in this case um many of them working in the architectural industry uh understanding those images how strikingly similar they are to the things that we are living today as we speak right uh it is like that saying like i cannot believe i still protesting for this um understanding how you know this is baltimore in 68 and baltimore in 2020 right there's almost nothing has changed and we need to somehow be able to recognize in a way the progress that has been made but also how little really has the the the the index shifted right how very little margin of error we have when we don't belong to the status school right uh understanding also where our where our alliances lie who are the people that may represent us where we we may find ideological discourses that align with what we are pursuing in the future understanding that we're really lucky i'm really lucky to be behind this screen here today and not behind a bulletproof screen in a lecture hall as many of our con comrades in history had to be like in the case of angela davies understanding where are our icons where are our struggles and what are the ideas that we are still trying to fight against right that even when systems like apartheid finish we are still embedded in the legacy of them uh understanding that many of the revolutionaries as a you know and i love the idea of the revolutionary um they're not with us anymore right because the system doesn't want them there so the the the true revolutionaries oftentimes don't i mean none of these ones passed uh made it past thirties right uh fred hampton day at 21 martin luther king malcolm x patrice lumumba all of them died in their 30s right understanding also what what does that mean for people like us that are thinking about the future when the future may not even include us right what are the futures that we are thinking about how can we start questioning the system right and in the case of patents lumumba that that i just showed uh um understanding really important histories and how they're often forgotten in the case here when we talk about the congo and being in an architecture school when we study modernism and we study all the avant-garde movements in europe uh oftentimes forgetting how these economies of knowledge economies of uh material capital uh were fueled right in this case congo really being at the center and understanding what is our place in this right what happens when the history of the congo is not enough to explain what is happening in the world where where the extraction is not only taking place in the colonies or in africa but it's moved beyond right like the in the rare earth mineral mines in in inner mongolia in china or even understanding what is the relationship to to our own backgrounds in this case and and we all know this painting by turner right with the with the slaves being thrown down the ship and what is something really interesting for me is that that i discovered through a book of marta ponte is that not only is this picture of a masterpiece right of uh of uh of romantic painting depicting uh the same the very same ideas that we are kind of struggling against um it was a painting that was sold that was owned by a boston couple that was sold to the museum and this couple bought uh a sugar plantation in puerto rico right so even the economies that fuel the art uh that it's creating the allegories and the metaphors that allow us to think about our struggle are being fueled by this very same economies that are keeping us oppressed uh understanding uh as achievement bases in the provisional notes of the on the post colony that the post colony in his case is made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery in which they are in place constitute a distinctive regime of violence characterized by political improvisation a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by a distinctive way in which identities are multiplied transformed and put into circulation right what is interesting about this definition by achieving ben is not only that the post colony is a condition about something that is happening because the colony is no more but what we like to propose and why the title of the of the presentation is a different type of post colony a postcolony that is based out of an imaginary an imaginary of what happens when the systems of cruelty of exploitation of brutalism not in the architectural sense but in the in the sense that achievement uses it in the sense of extreme brutality um are not only particular to the colonies but are somehow generalized all around the world right and and for for for me i think as a starting point i come from the oldest colony in the world puerto rico has never been um a sovereign country since since it was invaded in november 19 in 1493 so it was a 400 years a colony of spain it has been 123 years or 22 years a colony of the united states understanding what's the relationship what do we have to offer in the sense of an imaginary right when we see how many people die in the in hurricane maria people that were not even count counted people that were sometimes unnamed it was like uh they just disappear like in avengers end game like when they snap and it's gone right uh and understanding how that you know first happening in a colony it hits you also in the metropolis right with the thousands and millions of people that have died around the world in places like new york right with where we can see in this picture in the in the amazon in one in one case right of all this mass grave of of bodies right often times without name and i'm seeing this installation uh organized by rafael acevedo in front of the capitol building in puerto rico right with the four thousand six hundred people that died in hurricane maria understanding also what imaginaries we may get in order to imagine some sort of discourses that are that are trying to address what is happening here but bonnie in our in our uh that saw the ousting of our the first governor in the history of puerto rico right like that it was the first time that we managed to kick out somebody out of power um but bonnie was wearing already uh face shield and a mask six months before covet was even discovered right what apparatus do we have to understand this and and sort of use it to read what is happening around us right what was about the poem of raquel salas rivera a really important contemporary poet in puerto rico that that describes the manifesto of necropolitics right uh in one side with the four thousand six hundred people that die in the in the hurricane and then this beautiful and powerful prose that says hey gringo if you love death so much why don't you marry it right understanding who are the leaders of these revolutions right this is a picture of some of the the our most important revolutionaries in puerto rico uh this is the spokesperson of the feminist collective in construction with a t-shirt that reads anti-patriarchal feminist lesbian trans caribbean latin american right understanding what's the role of this uh of these new visions right or not new issues but bishops that are finally acquiring the protagonism they always deserve right seeing ricky martin waving the rainbow flag on one side or black john and educated a collective of high schoolers leaving all the protests in pittsburgh right that we got to witness understanding also the relationship of architecture to these systems of oppression is really fundamental if we want to make any difference right not only inside the united states these are pictures in puerto rico and us in chile right understanding what is the legacy of the colonial city in all of this right uh in the systems not only in the systems of oppression that architectural architecture often forms through through so-called public spaces and buildings uh but also the institutions or what michelle called called the apparatus like the dispositive um of of the police the army but also of the university right of the of the architectures right understanding what is the relationship of architecture to this in a literal way when sometimes we are made to choose between meaning and value right what matters more to you or what is more valuable to you if a building or black life right understanding the role of propaganda and double think to use a quote by uh by a concept by george orwell when we read about architects designing correctional centers and to facilitate the humane treatment and rehabilitation of inmates while ensuring the safety and satisfaction of each staff member right in a country that incarcerates black and brown people at exponential proportions right um understanding what is the legacy of of this you know the idea of the nation states uh the idea of the border the idea of architecture as a device that encloses and that gives you an identity right in exclusion of other ways of existing in the world understanding also the colonial footprint of this right and something that we've been working recently is trying to think beyond sustainability right what is the colonial footprint of everything we do that is tied up hundreds of years and that is tied up to a global economy of extraction and exploitation understanding who is at the center of these battles who has been there really understanding and being custodians of the environment custodians of the land right protecting this not only for their future but for everybody's future right understanding also what are the truly democratic forms of architecture not architectures where there's consensus through positives or some sort of meeting with the community but when the people really come together to bring this the the science the architectural signs of oppression and exclusion and white supremacy all around the world right this is a my favorite form of architecture is seeing people bringing all these racist monuments down part two loud readers 1920 2020 the only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively this requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness other words are possible we usually ask can you see the difference between the left and the right picture somebody will say yes you know and the left one is only men in the right one there's some women right uh understanding the legacy of the bauhaus right the legacy of the modernist pedagogy of design that we are all sort of embedded in right understanding that the people that did this didn't thought that women could even think in three dimensions right understanding that at the same time there were other schools working where not only women were allowed to be in the school but they were actually administering the school like the people's art school of biceps in a small jewish town of what is now known as belarus with students as young as 12 13 14 years old designing architecture together with some of the people that we consider important today like eliziski of casimir mia levice right and the fact that vera moleyeva was running the school in 1919 and we're still learning about gropius in a way uh erasing that history right particularly in a country like us that that makes a really big effort in erase anything that has to do with the with communism or socialism or anarchism or russia for that matter right understanding what is the legacy of these collectives today right the fact that these people as early as 1920 could have could work together without having to sign their name in their work right really finding true bonds of solidarity and collaboration in which it's not really about a single author but about a great narrative that should push them forward into the world understanding what other moves movements were happening at the same time and we don't even get to hear about them in the colony of puerto rico as as i mentioned already uh in the practice of rolling tobaccos right a really alienating practice in which tobacco workers are running tobaccos for many hours in a day they didn't have any right to a formal education they would choose one of their own who knew how to read to read aloud for them during their entire work day at the beginning they were read classics like victor lugo but like later on they would read karmars krapotkin and the anti-capitalist solidarity syndicalist imagination will give fruit to many strikes and many movements asking for a dignified life among these people luisa capetillo juana colombo is a capetijo that was arrested several times for wearing pants in public and she was one of the the leaders of these revolutions right not only was she a loud reader she also used to run a restaurant in new york well she would serve vegetarian food to workers even if they didn't have any money right understanding what forms of philosophy other you know that the similarities of life or harmony of life we can actually learn something valuable for the 21st century right understanding people like franz fanon or angela davies or achievements valencia sylvia rivera kosikanki all these really important critical and urgent discourses that oftentimes don't even make it to architecture school right in in this spirit we publish recently a manual of anti-racist architectural education wondering perhaps about that legacy of the visionary inventor of a so-and-so pedagogical model and trying to understand what is also the role of ideology in education right and and this is a great diagram by stephen truby based on a syllable shishek cruciform model in which it collocates their the universal left the global the right wing uh right uh the right wing capital is right the antisemitic left and the anticipated right and we know some of these people already like obviously patrick schumacher is a right-winger so that's like no question i mean he makes lectures call in defense of capitalism like capitalism needs him to defend it right which is kind of silly but also understanding where else is this sort of practice of misogyny sexism racism is right uh we know you know your your famous masters here peter eisenmann and richard meyer and now you know the fallen angels from the sky with the me too scandal but also understanding how these things get recycled right i remember you know here any architecture new york celebrating philip johnson you know nazi as we all know without questioning none of that uh they used to travel all around the world bringing all these sort of uh professors or architects associated with the ib league to tell everybody you know about architecture right but even if this is sort of an outdated model how it gets recycled in a way with the same discourses from the same institutions today with magazines with slightly different names right understanding how you know the panel on one side as you can see most of the men that are going to explain us about architecture and and often times when we have an alternative like in the case of justin garrett moore when he was presenting and got erased by architect magazine out of a panel right somebody went to the trouble of erasing the only black speaker in the panel out of the image right so we really have a problem with our institutions and it's not new and we need to do something about it so in a way we created this manual to not only think about the obvious ridiculous statements like you know donald trump signing an executive order to promote civic architecture maybe he had a contract with duke university um but um but working with uh with other institutions that sometimes even well intended or or coming from a from a a place of uh liberal good intentions uh are super complicit in the race erasure and and violence against uh against black people right in the case that uh somebody can can uh basically hire john black children to play with toy guns in a plaza for the applause of other white people in a space where they pretty much will get shot by the police if it's not because it's a biennale uh and it's not because it's sent there by a by a white person right or or all these people designing all these monuments for for uh for black slaves where the word black is never to be found and where apparently they couldn't find any black designer right because uh black men is only there to be a monumental slavery but never to be a designer of things right understanding what are the publications also that are doing this right and these are very popular publication by our colleague uh in virginia tech where he says that non-referential architecture has nothing to do with utopia dystopia or rocaism or critical theory but rather about that single genius shape in the world through architecture right and understanding how dangerous is to keep thinking like that in the 21st century right understanding that right-wing spaces are not only gas chambers and detention centers in the border but architecture school has been that for a long time right not only in these pictures as you can see of harvard when uh walter lopez was there right as you can see a bunch of boys deciding how are we all gonna live but even in the legacy of institutions like cyark right with the the sort of a very much survive of experimental la you know trying to break away from the institutions how radical can the institutions truly be right what is the legacy of these systems of knowledge in this case when we have like the wheel of the bauhaus that if we translate it is quite easily understood as a separation between things that men could do and women could do right and for this we propose a spiral that where everything should be intersected right where anti-racism is at the center but it has anti-ableism trans feminism anti-capitalism anti-colonialism ecological justice and where every form of knowledge should get intersected through that if we really want to have a critical discussion about anything right so if you want to talk about your triple o or your post-digital or your parametric and you're not really intersectioning it into ecological justice or ecological or anti-colonialism or trans feminism what are we doing really are we really thinking about the future or are we dwelling in past discourses right understanding how these tools that we have been seen for a long time like the evolutionary three by charles jenks that gets recycled all the time but never really integrating a real critical discourse can be understood in this regions of anti-blackness all around the world as we can see between jim grow up our tide and white australia policy understanding this in this graphics the relationship between philip johnson attending uh not a hitler june's rally the same year he founds the architecture and design department of moma right so it's not just a coincidence that these institutions have been historically anti-black right uh and it is not a coincidence also that many institutions you will never see uh people from other social and economic classes right and and we show us as we show in these diagrams and this is a problem really of of uh higher education in general right but if we see the the tuition the endowments and the tuitions of many institutions especially architectural schools versus the people that live in the communities where the university is located it's almost impossible for them to even aspire to study there so who truly can be an architect today who truly can learn about the discipline that is going to save us right through architecture what is who truly can be autopian or a revolutionary or a rebel within a discipline that is by system and by by all the ways it operates completely exclusionary decolonizing the university starts with deep privatization and rehabilitation of a public space the rearrangement of spatial relationship fanon spoke so eloquently about in the first chapter of danny latter it starts with a redefinition of what is public what pertains to the realm of a common and as such does not belong to any one in particular because it must be equally shared between equals first colonial landscapes so inspired by the project of unovis that was defined a new way of working collectively we funded past novice which was also the idea of producing as a group and having also a lot of different members from different fields so expanding also the the idea of collaborating with people who are in the field of cinema literature and arts and then we set ourselves like a series of events that you call like planetary events that could take many different forms uh and inhabit many different landscapes in this case based on the criticism of this sort of invitation of alexander von humboldt to some sort of western discovery of the world right like going to all these landscapes and all these forms of representation we set ourselves to sort of transform all these uh projects of of representation of uh sort of what we call postcolonial landscapes right and understand a legacy of uh of uh manifest destiny through representation and part a series of projects that we develop initially as the the imagining of how architecture has been used as a military tool for the occupation of spaces in the tropics uh and through a series of exhibitions like this colonial room where we show all these drawings and paintings and and uh and images evolve in a series of um what we call postcolonial postcards that are trying to address that sort of and question the legacy of these images as the politicize you know and quote unquote in this case uh we're trying to really question the the history of reading these images as the politicized images and trying to insert again at the center the role that the imaginary of of occupation takes in them right so we take all these images and sort of reimagine them through through the insertion of these militarized architectures we're also working currently on a play that works uh on the idea of post novice hopefully by the end of this semester we'll be creating a digital play with many different uh members of the collective all around the world addressing these ideas of the loud readers of the of the of the sort of uh the what what the post novice collective is asking in versus all these images that have been created in the history of representation uh and also recently we did a collaboration with uh with united nude uh the fashion brand in which not only the narratives were about these landscapes as desolated but we where we have the opportunity to insert ourselves through this sort of shooting during covet that became a collaboration where we could insert ourselves in the landscapes why are we telling these stories right so the idea of the designer as a behind the scenes orchestrator was sort of challenged by the idea that we are actually there narrating the stories about the landscapes this also relates to a project we're working right now in the in venice that opened for the biennale called the the unfolding pavilion where 12 architects did uh did a residency in a small island in a building by john hayduck that was demolished and where we also can explore the idea of what does it mean to have a postcolonial room in which we are thinking about this uh models of representation right of what does it mean to be postcolonial uh in the last iteration of the moma ps1 pavilion we proposed also a rethinking of the idea of the of the migrant body of the refugee body in new york particularly with tropic the tropical history of immigration to new york and we propose also a post-colonial summer garden there that also translates in a series of other exhibitions and performances so for example that's like a an installation we did with the novice collective where we reappropriated the some of the idea of architecture and uh organized also a series of events around the installation and exhibition where all the students and professors from literature and and writers of fiction were all collaborating and creating these narratives that allow us to reflect on the history of this sort of idea of collaboration but also while reading all these uh um postcolonial or transfeminis or anti-capitalist discourses and trying to think about the relationship with architecture through a series of public publications exhibitions uh manifesto readings this one was in uh the first one was in omaha in nebraska um followed by a series of talks uh the the last physical lecture we did was in carnegie mellon and we turned it into a propaganda event where we were trying to recruit people for past novice as you can see in this image and even more recently we also had the opportunity to create after copied a free online architecture school or trade school of architecture and you can access it still today where we have talks by many different people many different thinkers practitioners all around the world in africa in asia in the americas and in europe and in which all these critical discourses can come to the forefront and everything is available there with the workshops and the and the readings and the textbooks and so on trying to rethink that legacy of the loud reader in the tobacco factory as a something that we can bring today it allows us also to create like the anti-racist manifesto and share it through that platform um and also create other platforms in different languages and many different ways of loud reading right like that practice of the tobacco factory brought into contemporary times here with the afrotalks in puerto rico or even having the opportunity to loud reading the streets of pittsburgh during the black lives matter protest right and even joining um i think like real revolutionaries or activists that are working in the streets in their in their programs against white supremacy following also the idea of loud reading that's a studio we had the opportunity to run in carnegie mellon where we ask our students to become contemporary lab readers and to imagine a campus and laboratories that would go around different topics that they thought uh was urgent and so forth but like a for example like uh the campus designed that they did with a model and what was interesting is that we did that before last summer but already a lot of topics that become really vivid during this summer was were already tackled so for example taylor latimer did like this laboratory for emancipation of blackness where she was showing like a lot of contemporary artists and the idea of holding discussion uh about uh contemporary events or christopher ellery could like this laboratory for writing so like a school for writing or crystal shoe who is questioning also the role of social media and all the different kind of surveillance cassandra forward was also tackling the issue of land reclamation and how food also can be centered in architecture in our culture and what i what is a relationship with the land or cjn who questioned the the role of the american dream and we also had the opportunity to do a lot of different events with a lot of different publics so that's for example like a series of workshops that we did with children uh when we were in beijing or in different schools uh and we also created like a series of books for children where we play with the idea of narrative as critical narrative to to understand what does it mean to to build the world together or to live uh commonly right but like another installation that we did also with children where we had the opportunity to work with them in the idea of constructing not just cities but also like system and engaging again about the discussion of making the work together other words together so i think a lot of pictures of installation where we could also uh welcome a lot of kids of different ages part three form and media 2008 the limits of my language means the limit of my world and these are the two last parts we want to show the first one is about uh now that we're in the discussion of like oh no you know like formalism that's a eurocentric uh strategy we have to kill formalism there's other forms of doing uh i i love this picture of the of the cat in the in there that they found in um in nazca in peru right to show that um we have always always been formalists that's not really something that europeans invented and that's something that is really at the center of our of our practice uh you know between humor uh and and seriousness trying to understand what is the role and the legacy and where is where we can find that solidarity with history right across cultures but in in these discourses of of solidarity and struggle and and and of questioning of the status quo right uh for us we see it across many different media and and we are also a practice that because of the situation the the political situation economic situation has to figure out how to use that legacy to generate some sort of platforms of exchange of knowledge right and publications have been really central to our practice in the same way as exhibitions this is the first uh self-commission exhibition we did back in 2011 in beijing and many later exhibitions like the first one the first chicago architecture biennale where we have an installation or our most recent book on narrative architecture right so all these questions take many different platforms across different media that is really central to that continuous questioning of uh who controls history who controls the historical narrative right and how can we challenge that history right how can we tell the history of utopias like in this series of collages about 100 years of utopias and the most recent mural we did for an exhibition in nuremberg about 120 ideal cities um we didn't get to go because of covet but luckily at least they managed to do the exhibition so it's 120 years of ideal cities for the good and for the bad and trying to understand us as tom said in the introduction uh we're always trying to understand really the what's the legacy and the power form because the powerful seems to be able to understand it but then somehow that practice is kept away from us right from the people in a way trying to understand how how can we use that what is the relationship of form and ideology and political ideology what is the relationship of form and narrative uh we made this publication that we published in 2013 uh that now is being translated to chinese and published hopefully this year if kobe allows and presented to a series of also exhibitions in this case in beijing it got translated into german by ash blues in 2016 presented also in other forms of exhibitions in germany and uh later on turn india into projects for pavilions in china like the pavilion of shapes and a series of publications that dealt purely with the idea of form as a universal language where we will explore through this publication that it was published in 2014 in a series of poems of shape poems that would uh challenge uh scale uh and and media also right so trying to strip that idea of language to the bare minimum right through installation and through many other different strategies as uh you can see these are all of our pictures of our old apartment in beijing when we used to run sort of uh performance installations and a series of events in larger institutions part four platform spaces for pedagogy since each of us were several we were already quite a crowd and this is the last part of the exhibition and we're going to show you some architectural projects or some architectural platforms we were one of the finalists to design the the largest museum in russia somehow that was our first big project that we actually got paid for what we for our work and we end up traveling to moscow to design this new center of contemporary art we wanted to do a space that was open to the people even if they didn't have money to pay so we propose to put all the galleries in the second level and open all the public spaces in the ground level so people can actually have an art program without having to pay these ridiculously expensive tickets that museums have today at the end the client wanted a tower so they chose a project by another architect and we were kind of crushed but when we returned to beijing we figured out that we can have a program that has a different budget right so we found a small space in the center of the city and we open intelligentsia gallery and it became a really one of the i would say a leading center of critical discourse in china for a span of three years where we would do uh perhaps one of the few spaces that will run a truly international program with chinese artists but also artists from all every single continent except antarctica as i remember we we managed to do exhibitions group shows always with uh in this case are you and she there is a leading young chinese filmmaker or many different exhibitions that deal with many different discourses and positions this was the second year anniversary exhibition a great event is in the making but no one has noticed and again you can see the the sort of the crowd in this salon hanging with uh issues engaging with architecture or representation materialism uh um queer theory there was a many different opportunities to explore many different ideas uh as you can see uh with architects designers writers poets um all together working in this sort of anti-profit space uh for for position and discourses this allow us to engage with larger institutions with museums and art centers later on where we will create all these exhibitions as this one's hypertext or 010 you really know you really know where you are for the first time in history it's the last exhibition we did when we were in in beijing with here you can see falatelier or christopher ray perez juan she from moscow and then after this we were getting invited to do projects and these are two projects we i want to show you about the integrate education and and and sort of art as a public platform in the first one we were invited by a developer to to rethink a courtyard house that was in a kind of dilapidated state and they wanted us to do a second gallery a second intelligence gallery there and we proposed that it was only possible to do this if we fixed the conditions of our neighbors because they didn't have toilets they had to go to a public toilet and it's really uncomfortable and it's cold in the winter so we propose to use to increase the budget potentially and have the gallery with a residency but also to fit to to create uh more dignifying spaces for living we run an exhibition as an example to the for the developer and then we we we made a proposal uh and we proposed how to improve the spaces provide toilets and kitchens for the neighbors at the end the developer didn't want to invest in the neighbor so we declined the project but i think it was uh that was the only way we could have done this project and then the last project we wanted to show to you is a school we did in collaboration with the with the director of the business uh international business uh department in the university of nebraska lincoln so the idea was to create like a a campus that was two campuses uh one that would be located in in nebraska and there one that would be in africa and to allow exchanges uh between students between the both continents um so we approach the the project with the idea of working uh with a modular system to be able also to adapt in in the different contexts that the project would would be in and what really interested us with the program is that it was also about re-questioning education and agriculture and art would be at the center of a school so we approach the architecture thinking always like relationship with a land uh underground so each building can have access easy access to the outdoors so there's like many countries uh where a lot of different uh plants can grow and the idea also of of having a campus that would adapt through time um so far that's like for example like also like the main art spaces that could be also very flexible to hold classes but also exhibition uh and again always with relationship with outdoor spaces so that all the students the ideas of the pedagogical model of this school is that students learn through art making and farming right so there's this relationship between art and and engaging with the land that provides and that you have to take care of um so the whole idea was that the school can grow and shrink and it doesn't matter what it is but in this case always has direct access to an atelier and to and to the gardens in the in the building and that it can potentially be used all year long thank you thank you

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 322

Rating: 3 out of 5

Keywords: Architectural education, Architectural installations, Black Lives Matter, Collaboration, Colonialism, Decolonization, George Floyd protests, Gilets jaunes, Monument removal, MOMA P.S. 1, Museums, People’s Art School (Vitebsk), Public space, Resistance, Schools, Utopia, Worldbuilding

Id: -YKAMKsT4co

Length: 58min 32sec (3512 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021