On Cartography - Mapping identities that reside beyond borders

August 2023
Abstract only

Cartography is not passive; it is not merely a visual observation of the world. It is active. It has the power to shape the world too. Whether an instrument to conquest or politics, maps transform cultures as much as culture transform maps. We have been taught to understand countries as if they were fixed, unchanging and eternal, and so we have been taught to define ourselves in the same manner. But, countries had disappeared – Yugoslavia; appeared -- South Sudan; appeared and then disappeared - United Arab Republic ; Some are even younger than I am - Somalia. Countries appear hardly the right way of mapping the human being. The inherent lexicon to situate our identity based within countries prescribes a limiting fiction, the singular colonial lines, over reality: the plurality of human experience. The question it leaves us with is, is there a cartography system that maps geography based on human experience too? Referencing alternative ways of cartography with particular reference to African Cartographers, I outline the results of four examples of cartography - 1. Mapping with connections; 2. mapping with a direction; 3. mapping through a collective lexicon and; 4. mapping based on time (not distance) - that together construct a framework where we can depict the experiences and positions of the mapmaker. And, I address four tools that hold the power to make human experience a valuable unit of measurement and the amalgamation of these tools offer a cartography system equipped to map identities not so bounded by colonial borders.

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 in my masters. 
    1 - If your architectural institution doesn’t look at you, look beyond your institution
Problem: When tracing spatial practices and forms of other identities in the British architectural education framework is the lack of references. Its libraries, the seminars and studio culture are yet to have the answers to a problem it does not understand. As a result, education fails to see you. 
Suggestion: As a solution, look beyond your institution, and the architectural discipline. Boundaries must be crossed. Architecture is the only creative discipline not mentioned in Stuart Hall's New ethnicities essay when talking about the potential transformation creative representation has - film, theatre, music, art and dance - when addressing ‘difference’. Find resources in other creative disciplines and question how you can convert them into spatial principles. To learn outside of architecture, is also to learn truly the disciplines borders are not so precisely singular as our pedagogy teaches us. And this discovery to a diasporic identity, I found was somewhat liberating.
    2 -Validate contemporary references 
Problem: As a ‘self actualized people’ - a term I found in the War inna Babylon exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts early this year. Many students, like me, who are second or third generation immigrants have quite recent identities. On one side we were educated and raised here, so were ‘British’ in many regards, yet it was not reflected in their daily living conditions. On the other side, we divorce ourselves from the conservations, expectations and generational values of our migrant parents since our ‘home’ is not somewhere else. This not either or, spearheaded the construction of Black Britain’s consciousness and identity. 
Suggestion: If the architecture one is researching is as contemporary as an identity such as this one. Validate Contemporary references. Don’t sleep on Instagram, nor think that the FKA twigs Sad day’s video of kung fu fighting amidst an East London council estate or the Film Joy by Samona Olanipekun of the upbringing of Nigerian culture in London cannot be a validate architecture expression as much as a reference communicated in British education for over 60 years. [Read: Cook] Truth is, these references are more relevant to us, their use of spatial movement, lighting, and composition have an energy sometimes the british architectural pedagogy is yet to put into words.  
   3 - Satire
Problem: When one faces a project about ‘race’ and ‘difference’, it can include a heavy amount of politics and pressure that the institutions can not comprehend yet which can be stifling. 
Solution: Many people of color will already understand the use of Humor to understand, interpret and deal with race. As much as Humor can disempower, humor can offer opportunities to empower and to acknowledge a problem that is yet to find answers. (Bowers, 2005). (Andronoviene, 2014) or to shift situations from the negative to the positive, or create a context outside of realities and its political dialogue and imagine an alternative where ambiguities and qualities of critical race theory can be discussed  and lead to inter-racial catharsis. It is okay that your project’s primary audience is you. 
For example, Satire was used in this project via the Trinidad born, British film-maker Horace Ove’s Black Safari. A satire documentary which takes all the big trops of traditional white exploration of the ‘dark continent’ and reverses them.  When mimicking this idea into architectural project development, one was able to create a france to a playground so to speak, to allow for my project to existed afar from certain parameters of realties, it was ignorance of the truth, instead it allowed for one to move forward with imagination instead of readdressing history. 
    4 - Architecture is as much spatial practice as it is spatial form. Dance and movement is as much architecture as the buildings they are performed in. 
Problem: For many dwelling into non-colonial architecture, the theories of spatial practice become ever more interesting, yet one might be met with the question ‘But, where is the architecture’. 
Solution: Remember, previous I said, At the core, each architectural student is made up of two parts: 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 enforced) to find the answer.  Lesley Lokko puts it ‘The Zulu term for an architect, umqambi wesino, is a haunting and beautifully complex phrase, meaning alternatively and in no particular order “magician of space”, “maker of a situation”, or “maker of a sensation”.’ 
    5- State your history, but don’t feel the need to prove it
History is not something solely in the past, or even primarily. The burden we ‘other’ architectural practitioners have to face when asked to (re)address history is also the very proof that people carry history; it is present in all our work, it is history that defines our identities, our perspectives and our imagination. I found that instead of trying to prove a past, state what your history is and move on. 

Issi Nanabeyin 
2021