How to’ live out of your
imagination, not just your history - Five disobedient practices for diasporic architectural students October 2021
It approaches three years marking the murder of George
Floyd. At the time, a seismic shift in the architecture paradigm procceded to follow, thrusting individuals whoses double conciousness seperated their ‘self’ with their ‘architect’ into the forefront. To be both ‘Black’ and an
‘Architect’ was now to
confront an education that either we had to riot with its resistant or accept its pedagogy steeped ignorance.
Taxed with the onus to either alter or disprove a narrative of the once
singular architectural education, the daily studio day-to-day was now a daily
act of protest. Our projects were now political. Even if you didn’t intend it
to be, they were politicised. One’s choice to
do or to not do projects in
‘Africa’, or about ‘Blackness’ held weight, not just for the project itself, but for our identities, our mentors, our academic units, and our institutions. Architectural exploration became arduous for
the ‘others’. At the core, each architectural student is made up of
a dichotomy between their ‘self’ and their ‘education’.
The prior, is built from one's cultural heritage and personal
experience, it is what determines the questions one chooses to ask. The latter,
defined by our education, commands in whose library you choose (or restricted)
to find the answer. For diasporic architectural
students, frequently their authentic questions don’t yet have authentic answers
in this education. And whilst it is as true ‘its not [our] job to educate you’, the new
young diasporic generation are left burdened with additional non-curricular
work, left to spell out evident architectural past to prove decolonial ideas
of architecture exist and work over hollow rebuttal. While the refrain 'it's not our job to educate you' holds true, the burden falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the new generation of diasporic architects. We're tasked with not only articulating the glaring omissions in architectural history but also defending decolonial ideas against dismissive rebuttals. Even when a we students managed to push our innovative ideas forward, securing their approval for our vision, you find themselves buried under the weight of architectural etiquette. By the time the green light is given, countless folio pages have been filled, months have slipped away, and there's often scant time left to live out our imagination beyond their ficitious history.
As a tutor now, I look back at this time with more hindsight and want to say ‘To breach boundaries into our imagination calls for a little bit of disobedience’. As a tutor too, I remember the copious amount of reading we do, so in short, here are the five practices, do with them what you will, I used to bypass the British pedagogy of teaching which allowed me to live out my imagination
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