happenings in space #6: nov. 9 - nov. 16
black insurgent aesthetics, critical access studies, the green new deal, geo-logics and necropolitics, architecture and participation, the kitchen as an intimate geosocial critical space
we’re tired. we’re making it to zooms when we can. we’re exhaling from the last four years and inhaling in preparation for moving and organizing in the next four.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9
A TALE OF TWO CITIES: Black Insurgent Aesthetics & the Public Imaginary — UCLA — 12:30PM
Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley, will speak on the spontaneous production of graffiti art and murals covering the entrances of businesses in Downtown Oakland, CA, in the wake of recent global protest movements against state violence and systemic racism. I argue that the art makes legible what gets hidden through the violent processes of gentrification and neoliberal urbanism. What is revealed through the art is the convergence of two co-constitutive publics—a segregated, decaying city mostly inhabited by poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents and laborers, and a modern, prosperous, neoliberal city that caters to a privileged class of white residents and tourists—especially as the city grapples with the management and regulation of public space in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
ARCHITECTURE AS GOVERNANCE: Displacement, Resettlement, and Power Tensions in Nubian Resettlement Villages — CORNELL — 10:00AM EST
In 1964, the Egyptian government displaced Nubians from their homeland to state-built settlements all to clear the way for the Aswan High Dam. After their involuntary resettlement, Nubians and their indigenous institutions have suffered cultural and economic disenfranchisement. I will present you a case in my home village, Qustul. I will walk you through our village and inspect the role of a modernist built environment in the disenfranchisement of Nubians, to examine how the agency works on a day to day basis. From a national enterprise, to a religious fundamentalist operation, to an indigenous institution struggling to sustain itself, the powers at play in Qustul shift perpetually unsettling the settlement. I ask questions about the reasons for spatial injustice, stigma, and discomfort in my home village and look at the stories of myself, my kin, and buildings. My questions require my visceral implication in the answer and consequently open my eyes to modes of spatial resistance and resurgence in an unsettled settlement
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10
PERSONIFYING CAPITAL: Architecture and the Image of Participation — Kadir Has University
As part of the ARCH410 Graduation Seminar course, the public lecture this week will be honored to host Douglas C Spencer, with his lecture on Personifying Capital: Architecture and the Image of Participation.
JASON W. MOORE: UNTHINKING THE CLIMATE BOMB: CIVILIZATIONAL CRISIS, CLASS STRUGGLES AND CLIMATE HISTORY IN THE HOLOCENE AND BEYOND— University of British Columbia — 1:00-2:30 PM PST
To get beyond today’s proliferation of climate doomsday porn, we’ll need to look closely at two entangled histories. One turns on the Cold War imaginary of nuclear armageddon, whose quite tangible “bomb” metamorphosed into Paul Ehrlich’s landmark The Population Bomb, in which “too many people” portended a not-too-distant doomsday of famine, poverty, pestilence, and war. While the particulars have changed since 1968, today’s dominant environmental imaginary routinely narrates the climate crisis as a clash of Man and Nature, with End Times clearly visible on the horizon: a climate bomb. A second history looks at the mosaic of human-centered relations of power and re/production in the web of life — a history in which climate conditions and changes figure prominently. Giving special focus to the relations of climate, class, and civilization over the past seven centuries, environmental historian Jason W. Moore shows how climate shifts have been implicated in profound suffering and violence, but also in the emergence of new possibilities for egalitarian politics. To make sense of these new possibilities, however, we’ll need to let go of “Man and Nature” and its love affair with the apocalypse — and begin to unthink the climate bomb.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12
Aimi Hamraie, “CRITICAL ACCESS STUDIES” — HARVARD GSD — 7:30PM EST
Thirty years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, much of the built environment remains inaccessible to disabled people. Accordingly, the vast majority of research and writing on accessibility seeks to convince the unconvinced of the value of inclusion. This field, which I term “Access Studies,” would benefit from greater engagement with the concepts, practices, and political commitments of critical disability studies. In this talk, I will discuss the emerging field of “Critical Access Studies,” which engages with the methodologies, epistemologies, and political commitments of accessibility from the perspectives of Disability Justice and disability culture. Using historical and contemporary examples, I will illustrate the difference that critical perspectives on disability—including intersectional perspectives—can make for architects seeking to understand design with, by, and for disabled people.
ARCHITECTURES OF VIGILANTISM — MAS Context — 4:00 PM PST
In issue 33 of MAS Context, Germane Barnes, Shawhin Roudbari, and a cohort of contributors explore ways that space and design condition, encourage, and express acts of vigilantism. Encounters where citizens police one another along racialized, gendered, and classed lines are a characteristic of everyday life in the US. Aggressors accost, resistors assert, and witnesses evaluate the presence of bodies in space. Can designers, architects, and urbanists address vigilantism? The contributors to the forthcoming issue of MAS Context bring nuance and insight to this question.
ENERGY DEMOCRACY AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL — CUNY Humanities Center — 12:00PM PST
Wildfires, hurricanes, famines, and the pandemic – we live on a planet already in deep ecological crisis, with worse to come if today’s climate inaction, soaring inequality, and state violence continue. To shift things and win a just transition, we need ambitious planning and abundant struggle. This panel features activists and thinkers Julian Brave NoiseCat, Summer Sandoval, Ashley Dawson, Trevor Ngwane, and David Hughes whose work is helping to move the fight for energy democracy forward.
IKEM S. OKOYE: ELUSIVE THINGS — MIT Architecture — 6:00 PM EST
Architects, architectural historians, and conservators from across three continents, all pursuing their own agendas and interests, have worked rather more intensively in the Sahel over recent years than in the past, African practitioners included. The context is one, however, in which architectural histories that are only ever partial, produced here under constraint, can leave unreliable interpretations of the architectural past to which at least some architects and conservators refer, or from which they seek inspiration or direction. Overcoming the reading of historical architecture through the lens of the traditional conceptualizations of space and medium with which architectural knowledge has worked, in favor of critical engagement with dynamic intersections of spatiality and materiality, and their forms of situatedness, offer superior ground not only for historical reconstruction, but for contemporary architecture and conservation. This might be especially true, if we do so imagining the possibility of architectures and historiographies of decoloniality.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16
Kathryn Yusoff, “Geo-Logics: Natural Resources as Necropolitics” — HARVARD GSD — 12:00PM EST
This talk addresses how natural resources are the dominant and normative modality of matter, one that is predicated on and institutionalizes racialized relations. Two stratal relations deployed in the making of natural resources in the U.S. are addressed. First, the stratigraphic imagination of race in Louis Agassiz’s geographic race maps and portraits of the enslaved, alongside his scientific and political claims about polygenesis, plantations and the enduring legacy of racial difference. The second strata examines a convict lease prison mine in Birmingham, Alabama, which helped build the ‘Magic City’ and floated U.S. Steel on the stock exchange. This example of the carceral form of ‘natural resources’ and the undergrounding of black life during and after Reconstruction built the white surfaces of Modernity, enacting the stratigraphic imagination of racial difference as surface and mine. I consider both these accounts of materiality as affective infrastructures of White Geology that point to broader sites in the racializing geo-logics of natural resources and the decolonizing of matter. Within the talk I will address questions of material memory and redress, alongside the weaponization of geology through natural resources as an affectual architecture of racializing difference.
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS, FILM SERIES, ETC.
CRITICAL COOKING SHOW — e-flux architecture
Through the act of cooking, kitchens establish implicit, visceral understandings of the world. No recipe is neutral; no tool universal. Since the advent of social media, and particularly since lockdown, people around the world have opened their personal kitchens to the unknown viewer. As an intimate, geosocial, critical space, kitchens are places for stories to be told; for new kinships to be made, and new alliances to be forged.
MAPPING THE NEW POLITICS OF CARE — YALE, COLUMBIA
Launched by Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership, Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research, this map explores the vulnerabilities of our communities in the age of #COVID19 and how to respond to them. | COVID-19 affects our communities differently. Health and social vulnerabilities that predate the pandemic have fueled uneven effects across the United States. Unless we address the long-standing inequalities embedded in the social and political landscape of the country along with the immediate needs produced by the pandemic, we will come out of the current crisis just as vulnerable as when this all began.
BLACK BOTANY: THE NATURE OF BLACK EXPERIENCE — NYBG — EXHIBITION
Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience seeks to acknowledge the complex relationship between enslaved Black people, nature and the colonial environment and reconsider the conscious omission of Black knowledge of the natural world.
PERFORMANCES FOR HANDS AND DESERT FLOOR | JILL R. BAKER | ANTI-AESTHETIC — VIDEO SERIES
Performances for Hands and Desert Floor performs a physical and embodied relationship with the landscape. Each piece considers performance, sound, and mark-making in landscape and was created on site in the Mojave desert outside of Death Valley National Park in Rhyolite, Nevada at the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Residency Program. Jill R Baker is a visual artist whose work employs drawing, performance, and video to document improvised interactions with the natural world.
The R.A.W. POSTLIBRARY | Karin Bolender | ANTI-AESTHETIC — RESIDENCE
Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher who seeks "untold" stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, pollinators, microbes, and many others. Under the auspices of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), she cultivates a homegrown, collaborative living-art-research practice that explores dirty words and entangled wisdoms of earthly ecologies through performance, writing, video/sound installation, and other experimental arts of multispecies storytelling. The R.A.W. PostLibrary is an ecological LivingArtResearch performance-residency, exploring the hyperlocal/hyperglobal ecologies of staying-at-home, whatever “home” might mean.
UNOCCUPIED TERRITORIES: THE OUTLYING ISLANDS OF AMERICA'S REALM — CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION — EXHIBITION
At the outer edges of the USA are the tattered fragments of its dominion, known as the Minor Outlying Islands. Though officially uninhabited, each of these islands is one of the 14 Territories of the USA (along with five that are inhabited: Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa). Over the course of empire, most of these remote atolls and islets have been utterly transformed, by resource extraction and global wars. Now they are remnants of our history, where human visitation is restricted or banned outright. The islands are being reclaimed by wildlife, and evolving in their own way. Their future is driven less by national interests, and more by the collective needs of the planet.
MAKING SENSE — Penn Program in Environmental Humanities — EXHIBITION
Making Sense is an art exhibition supplementing and illuminating the scholarly talks included in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling program. The digital gallery features digital objects contributed by artists and scholars who are also participating in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling Convening. Objects are good to think with and those displayed here provide imaginative prompts to conceptualizing environmental challenges that often elude representation.