 Well, this is quite an exciting day after this open house day that brought us so many new people and faces and so many discussions and conversations along the day, it's very exciting to be here and bring all these two discussing one particular practice, that of Emmanuel at Masu, that it's incredibly important in the school and I would say in the world now, I would say, and I will explain myself. But I think it's great that we can do this today here because this place stands and it's been standing for the possibility for architecture to be relevant in transforming the world and not only architecture but other practices, planning, preservation, urban design, real state and I think that this is something that very clearly it's what makes Emmanuel at Masu such an important contributor to the school, to the fields in which he operates mostly architecture and urban design, but also to the world of culture and art at large. Because Emmanuel at Masu is an architect, an artist, alongside his partner Jim Wood that also is a graduate from the school, he's a founder of Adwo, a transnational practice that operates in New York, Addis Ababa and Melbourne and this transnational condition is not just an accident, I would say, but is owned by Emmanuel and by his practice as a way of being, as a way of being and assisting as part of the world. He's also the co-founder and board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective alongside Mario Guden that is also here and that those that are coming today and those that are seeing us on streaming have been in touch with today and of course those that are part of the school know Mario very well as professor and also director of the MR program. Emmanuel is also a graduate from the school and I remember him very well when I came here 10 years ago and you were already teaching and you were doing many things in the school and we had all these intense conversations in the corridors and I think that that's something that shapes the place where we are as well, the possibility for these encounters and see how people evolve in time as part of what we do. He's now a full-time professor at G-SAP and he's teaching architecture and urban design and he's previously taught at RISD and at the GSD. Emmanuel's practice is incredibly complex. It's actually one of these practices that often people have a hard time to define which I think is good. His work on installations at Worst Tapestries, he's made basically Agu together with his partner occupy a space in the realm of arts but also he's a researcher and often we see his work published as architectural spatial research and for instance the work that he developed on the marketplaces of the Carriaco in Dar es Salaam and the Mercato in Addis Ababa is something that basically helped understand that all the compounds in Addis Ababa that I'm sure he will explain today is something that basically allowed to understand how the specific urbanisms that have been developed in particular places like Addis Ababa or Dar es Salaam have escaped the capacity of the global north to account for a big part of the spectrum of architectural practices and knowledge. So he's done very extended research on the colonial, the persistence of colonial order in Atlanta and he's instructed actually a vocabulary that helps us to understand what is happening in architecture, what is being happening, what is the way that we can confront coloniality in architecture now but his writing is also has also been incredibly influential in architects like architecture without measure notes on legibility with Genwood and black compound have actually helped understand what is the basically the way architecture is confronting questions of coloniality and colonialism now and how structural racism is being performed through architectural practices but not only that art, research, writing comes together with design and his practice, the practice that he runs together with Genwood Adwo is also building now exciting I would say single family and multifamily residential projects in Addis Ababa and right now and you were telling me now that he's about to be published and already opening a new space in Williamsburg for light industries but this I would say legendary independent space for art and cinema in New York and Williamsburg but that comes together with a large number of proposals that have been circulating in the last year in architectural media where basically he found other ways not necessarily constructing to intervene architectural discourse something that of course has been widely celebrated and very influential even among our students here and that I think that could be could not be now understand if we don't see all the different layers of Emmanuel's practice at the time that there was a general celebration of informality Emmanuel challenged idea of the Mercato in Addis Ababa as saved by informality but instead by a notion of form that is composed by technologies and temporarities programs and physicalities that require alternative discourses and representations and that escaped the urban and architectural describe descriptions of Western traditions research history buildings and urban interventions are part of a consistent project intended to operate intended to operate in a space that has no conventional archives that is distributed that is not contained by state borders a practice that in his own words combines aggressive for interpretations of history and radical imagination of the future something that I love about the manual writing is that he write in first person that's something that really I'm really attracts me his voice is not an upset voice of generic universal wisdom but instead one situated in a particular history and in a social setting in his article black compound he speaks as someone who serves an apartment in Providence Rhode Island with a kid and another person who built his life by moving from Addis Ababa to Marietta Georgia as a teenager who felt like falling into the reef that exists between Africa and the Americas these international constellations of Afro diasporic spaces are the sites where both his life and his work in unfolds he describes his art design and teaching practices as operating at the intersection of design theory the spatial justice and contemporary African art at which work was featured in the 2021 exhibition reconstructions architecture and blackness in in America at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Gisa professor Mabel Wilson and son Anderson their their installation focus on the immeasurability of black spatial practices in Atlanta it explores the immediate ways in which black people have been imagining liberation within spaces of containment and manuals work inquires and confronts the long engagement of architecture in delivering land and the world as something that can be measured divided and owned by establishing bodies and terrains and humans and nature as independent by imposing a modern logic of ownership transparency and measurability on indigenous or on indigenous cosmologies to the work of Emmanuel architecture gains affinity with the words of Sylvia winter Edward glissand the needs for radar the silva tabian yonggong say DJ a hard man and Manuel claims that architecture voices that are so important now I want to and voices that are somehow coming through the walls of the auditorium that we are as as as voices that are basically transformed in everything that we do now and Manuel claims that architecture is a discipline that represent existing spatial conditions while imagining alternative futures leaving projective imaginations aside it is critical that we begin to grapple with the ways in which architecture represents and by extension erases existing spatial practices and conditions please join me in celebrating the manuals here tonight. Well, that that was a very serious introduction. So so thank you Dean Hake for this incredibly generous introduction but also for inviting me to give the open house lecture in front of a lot of my heroes teachers current students and also folks who are thinking about joining us here at GSAP. So no pressure. I'll be presenting some work from my practice, Adwo, in partnership with Jen Wood and I just want to start off by acknowledging the fact that all of this work have relies heavily on Jen's brilliance, talent and generosity and our practice works in collaboration with lots of people near and far, especially a lot of people in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam. And one of our current collaborators, a recent GSAP graduate, Jean Han is also here. So I'll present a few snippets also from my teaching practice. Just to think about potential overlaps between the thinking we're doing in the practice and the ongoing experiments in pedagogy. Some of these thoughts will be clear and direct, while others will be somewhat fragmentary and oblique. So let's get started. Mati Diop's 2019 film, Atlantics, is a story about a ghost generation. A generation of youth that disappeared in the sea. As they were attempting to cross over to Europe, but instead of telling the story from the standpoint of the young men continue to depart from the coast of Senegal, she focused on the women who were left behind. We are interested in spatial practices that function as vectors, opening up space for new readings of historic and contemporary conditions. The migration of people and artifacts across the Atlantic, the search for refuge and opacity, thinking with Daniela Johannes's work on geographies of migration on the left to consider what is lost in transit and what is left behind. The earth becomes our skin. Some of the images of the small scale mining practices that have replaced industrial mining sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our reminders of the various ways in which coloniality limits our ability to see. By refusing to present a single story or a direct solution to complex and multilayered problems, we rehearse ways of positioning ourselves against the forced transparency of the ethnographic gaze. We are interested in making images that are suspended between abstraction and figuration, multi-vocal and at times dissenting ways of making and occupying space. But a lot of our work asks who gets to do the measuring and under what circumstances. This is a map of the African continent drawn by an American anthropologist who had never visited the continent. It is, of course, a much more fragmented image of Africa than the one we've grown accustomed to, but even in this attempt to acknowledge multiplicity beyond the obvious inaccuracies, like most cartographic projects that render static borders. Inversely, Ashil and Bembe notes how pre-colonial African boundaries were not established to limit movement, but to intensify interactions between multiple tribes. Therefore, one of the core tenets of the colonial state is finding ways to contain the natives that are constantly on the move. So colonial cartography will always fail to measure the myriad ways in which these landscapes have been and continue to be indigenized. Moving across the Atlantic, this is a map of the state of Georgia in 1861. Measuring the percentage of enslaved Africans in each county, again merging the measurement of land with the measurement of black life. Both rendered as property. Our ongoing projects and measurability attempts to trace the seams between the material and immaterial conditions generated by the two previous maps. The singular worldview that has produced our current world order. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge serves as an ontological frame, articulating a set of spatial practices that work against the regimes of measurement and quantification imposed by coloniality and racial capitalism. It identifies a relational zone between landforms and people that remain tethered to one another. Sylvia Winter describes the current permutation of the human as Homo economicus, acknowledging economics as the dominant discipline of our time, a hegemonic world order that took over from religion. She even describes economists as being priestly and their influence over mankind and more specifically in their influence over regimes of valuation, rendering African bodies and land a sites of extraction that feed European and North American sites of accumulation. This is coupled with her critique of the biocentric logic, a racial regime that locks meaning and value with biology. As a countermeasure to this biocentric logic, she proposes a conception of the human borrowing from Fanon as a hybrid between bios and mythoi, genetic codes and non-genetic codes. What she describes as the non-genetic or the sociogenic principles are proclivities to fashion ourselves through myths and narratives, origin stories. I'm particularly fascinated by this formulation because I come from a nation state that understands itself through a seemingly exceptional origin story. It maintains symbolic importance in the Pan-African imaginary as the only African nation that was able to successfully resist European colonization. But this preservation of sovereignty required a more regional form of imperialism. The Amharic word dimber connotes an amorphous landmass demarcated by its natural features. The Amharic word gubbi connotes a smaller territory surrounded by a wall or a fence. These multi-scalar notions of fluctuating territory help us understand the fleeting urban form of Addis Ababa, how people claim territory and how territory is either solidified or compromised. Shortly after the first Italo-Ethiopian War, Empress Daitu and Emperor Minolik moved and settled on a mountaintop in the center of what became a new nation state. Topography has significantly determined the urban form of the city of Addis Ababa. Settled as a temporary military camp for the Ethiopian Empire, a nodal network of houses for army generals and lieutenants radiates out from the rural compound on adjacent hilltops. Militarizing the topography. These rivers and gubbies on hilltops still anchor the main neighborhoods of the city. This out of mind sovereignty is augmented by a social framework that is porous and amorphous. At its core, the gubbi is a defensive typology. It has a clearly defined edge containing a series of varied indoor and outdoor spaces. It is a zone of respite and relative stability carved out of an errant and restless city. I grew up in a gubbi in Addis Ababa, a zone that is constantly penetrated by neighbors, friends, relatives, and their loved ones, providing intimate communal environments for long and short-term occupants. A variety of materials are used to fence in the plots. Eucalyptus trunks, corrugated sheets, metal grills, stone, and masonry. Gubbies contain houses, parks, schools, gardens, spaces of worship and commerce. They host events such as weddings, wakes, religious rituals, and celebrations. The boundary of the gubbi has literal and metaphorical depth. It is not a line on a map, but a zone of contestation, pushed and pulled by shifts in politics, culture, and economy. It is a repository of the city's history. The contemporary construction sites of Mercato could be read as practices in defending the perimeter. Fortified at their base with transient rings of merchant stalls, abbreviations of the gubbi, and the building's under construction are crowned with ephemeral envelopes made of tarp and eucalyptus scaffolding. All land in Ethiopia is owned by the state, and leased by collectives and individuals. In most cases, the building's under construction is built in the form of a building. The building's under construction are crowned with ephemeral envelopes made of tarp and eucalyptus scaffolding. All land in Ethiopia is owned by the state, and individuals. In most cases, this has intensified real estate speculation, but it has also introduced a level of unpredictability and mutability that is different from western notions of property. Over the past few years, we have been designing a series of projects that interpret the spatial and social conditions found in these everyday spaces. One of our first projects as a practice was a large compound that had a series of existing buildings. Two houses for siblings have returning home after having lived in the United States for decades. So we designed a very simple landscape and canopy strategy, co-hearing the two new additions with the existing structures on the site. One of our first projects as a practice was a series of additions with the existing structures on the site. The contemporary transformations of the Gipi throughout Addis Ababa reflect materializations of the dashboard condition, namely the contradictions embedded in the desire and the impossibility of the return. This project is a microcosm of cross-generational exchange, materialized through a post and beam frame and filled with either glass or stone that matches the existing compound wall. And we have continued to explore these ideas through various design projects, testing expanded definitions of kinship that go well beyond the boundaries of the site. The Gipi is currently being updated to match an increasing demand for density. In my lifetime, the population of Ethiopia has almost doubled. The median age in Ethiopia is less than 20 years old, therefore the population will continue to grow exponentially. So we've been experimenting with ways of stacking the Gipis of Addis Ababa to design these multifamily residential buildings. And the mild climate of Addis allows for an exchangeable set of indoor and outdoor rooms and a great degree of spatial fluidity throughout the year. This project simply responds to the two-meter zoning offset required by the city. And the building has a similar organizational profile and plan and in section, allowing for two hemispheres that are wrapped with a brick screen salvaged from villas that are currently being demolished throughout Addis Ababa. So by stretching the compound wall to the height of six dories, we were able to create a garden matrix between the compound wall and the building proper. And the brick screen is conceptualized as a vertical tapestry with staggered openings. The four sides of the building are slightly different versions of that tapestry in response to extended negotiations with neighbors and the municipality. And those slight misalignments between the openings on the building proper and the apertures in the brick screen offer varied lighting conditions on each floor of the apartment building. This project is currently under construction. This is a picture we took this summer and we just finished pouring the second floor slab a few days ago, so fingers crossed. Thinking about this piece, Libredo, by Charles Gaines. Fred Moten writes, I'm interested in what can't be finished or cleared up. The unpayable debt. The unaccountable. The monk-like discipline of the artist Charles Gaines, who for the most part works in series, produces work that is rigorously systematic and intellectual. Playing with language while resisting interpretation. This work superimposes excerpts from an opera by Manuel de Fala with a speech by Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael. Large-scale tapestries have given us a medium to examine some of the most fundamental questions of architecture. And Charles Gaines' work has been instructive in helping us think about the liminal space between codes and experiences, especially when it comes to representing the two marketplaces we've been working on, Nacondar Salon and Mercato and Addis Ababa. So one of the first tapestries we produced traces the temporal materials that have been used to build a marketplace over the past 80 years. Collapsing Mercato into 126 scenes and learning from the notational systems developed by Charles Gaines for his Numbers in Trees series. So this is the tapestry, the Mercato tapestry which was commissioned by the African Mobilities Exhibition curated by Empomo Tsipa. And I would say that we're still searching for ways to think about the history of Mercato both as a materialization of a racialized colonial imaginary and a space for collective resistance. Eucalyptus framing, corrugated metal sheets, sliding doors and metal shutters offer details of resistance against the tyranny of permanence imposed by the development paradigm. I would say that the origin story of Dar es Salaam could be understood as a counterpoint to the origin story of Addis Ababa. Many of the buildings in Karyako have formal and material qualities that echo architectural details from across the Indian Ocean. Reflecting the rich history of movement in exchange between South Asia and East Africa. But Dar es Salaam's proximity to the Indian Ocean has also rendered it valuable and therefore vulnerable to various imperialist regimes. Multiple types of boats, ships and tankers are employed in the choreographed extraction of resources and labor from the hinterlands across the ocean. So in order to understand this a little bit further we've been documenting the Cartesian units of measurement imposed to facilitate this colonial extraction and how those systems of measurement prefigure the urban form of specific neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam. For example, this 9 by 9 meter grid of the coconut farm established by Sultan Majid bin Syed of Zanzibar in 1862 pretty much initiated a regime of measurability on Dar es Salaam. The land, its people and resources have since been allotted to quantifiable units. The coconut farm transformed into plots for single-family homes for indigenous Africans within the racially segregated master plan that was designed by the German colonial regime and in place eventually by the British. But even the name, the name Karyako is a Swahili-ized derivation of the Karyakorps depot, a generic industrial shed used by German and British troops during the First World War. But after independence on January 25th 1967 a few years after the nation gained independence the Pan-Africanist leader the first president of Tanzania, Julius Nerere introduced his political philosophy of Ujama promoting egalitarianism, socialism and self-reliance. The Karyako Market Hall is an open-air structure shaded by 24 concrete funnels each spanning 15 meters. That harvests rain and facilitate passive cooling for the three platforms of trading spaces below. Designed by Tanganikan architect Beta Amuli the Market Hall canopy recalls the coconut trees under which markets were held in the past. But it is also an animist enactment of Ujama. For the past few years I've been co-editing a book with curator and art historian Anita Bateman called Where is Africa? It is an anthology of interviews, essays and commissioned artworks slated to be published by the Center for Art Research and Alliances CARA early next year. The book offers opportunities to expand the vocabulary we use to theorize African cities and aesthetic practices. The book is designed by the incredible Nancy Kolelo Mutiti and has 24 contributors in total interviews and original interventions, essays and artworks. I don't want to ruin the surprise but the forward is written by someone we all know and admire very much who might be in this room. This project was generated from my own frustrations with the myopic nature of contemporary architectural discourse. So the project really engages in an interdisciplinary and transnational conversation with contemporary artists, curators and designers. And Where is Africa really begins by accepting the premise that placemaking is an elusive endeavor in post-colonial context. And instead it proposes an elastic definition of geographic and disciplinary positioning to engage in conversations with people that are actively making Africa, both within and outside its geographic boundaries. By examining artists' collectives, new currents in art history and the use of contemporary art festivals or specifically the rise of contemporary art festivals in and about Africa from the past 10 years. So instead of forging a unified image of a vast and culturally limitless region, the book is concerned with questions of access, movement and transformation as compulsory imperatives to a sustained and critical discourse on contemporary cultural production. And I would say the aim is still to disrupt epistemological tendencies that address contradictions within neo-colonial discourse without articulating the subversive agency of colonized people and places. And these conversations led us from Providence to New York City, Dar Salam, Addis Ababa, Boston and Johannesburg in search of the connective tissue that links people of African descent across the diaspora through visual culture and a shared commitment to authorial reclamation. These conversations were punctuated by a public event that was held at the Rhode Island School of Design and the book release will be accompanied by a series of public events here in New York City, Dar Salam and Addis Ababa. And the aim is to develop an iterative set of conversations that interrogate dominant perceptions of Africa and its diaspora. So where does Africa ask us how we position ourselves in relation to specific geographies, histories and disciplines? Our ongoing research on the urban marketplaces in East Africa has also been shaped through a series of conversations and collaborations across disciplines and geographies. And one of the earliest articulations of this was the stop-motion animation. This is a still from it that we did in collaboration with the artist Ezra Rube. And this collaboration was really an opportunity to think through questions of temporality across various disciplines and practices of image making. And we produced the narratives and drawings and Ezra was translating them into animated scenes with soundscapes that he recorded in the marketplace. It was a fluid process that allowed us to go beyond the static conventions of architectural representation. And we've continued to think about these marketplaces at the regional scale beyond the nation state. And this is the first encounter upon entering the True Markets exhibition we made in 2019. And our installation really functions as a non-linear collection of spatial fragments from Carriaco and Mercato. But specifically misalignments between the colonial imaginary and local resistance has been central to this research on the social spatial identities of the marketplaces, producing images and artifacts that narrate the fragmented history of Dar es Salaam and Ad Sava. So the aim is always to identify difference within a context that is often rendered as homogenous. And these two markets have radically different social and spatial identities due to their varied engagements with coloniality. For example, we've been imaging how the fragmentation of Dar es Salaam has registered at the scale of the city block in Carriaco. How the gaps resulting from the unitization of Carriaco by the coconut grid are being redefined. We've been thinking about the neocolonial implications of contemporary transit systems, what they connect and what they divide. We've been attempting to trace the growing influence of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and how it is producing a national and continental network of transportation infrastructure that is almost exclusively being built by the Chinese government. The multinational tech companies that are shaping the urban form of contemporary cities in Africa, the failure of western banking systems and the global battle for next generation 5G networks. But we've also been trying to document various forms of collective ownership in Mercato that produce mega blocks of resistance against land speculation. And we're also interested in the instability of monuments. These instabilities offer opportunities for shifts in politics and culture. How building that was designed as a demonstration of individual wealth in a feudalist society becomes a symbol or a monument for socialist military junta. The various overlaps of religion and commerce which is apparent throughout the city, but especially on this block where the biggest mosque in the city shares a wall with one of the biggest churches in the middle of Mercato. And in both cases, the urban marketplace is a microcosm of the nation and they present various aspirations of sovereignty. And we're attempting to conceptualize these African marketplaces as spaces to envision a form of liberation that is yet to be achieved. In line with this work, we also understand that world-making after-property requires collective imagination. This semester, I'm teaching with a brilliant group of colleagues and students in the urban design program. Our studio titled Atlanta After Property challenges students to identify samples, temporal slippages, and spatial practices that carve out moments of liberation from the limits of property. And the studio is framed around a central question. How can we disentangle architecture and urban design from property? Last spring, I taught a studio called After Images and the studio engages with the ongoing global debates over the vast collections of looted African artifacts that are contained in European and North American museums. These debates, augmented by scholarly and artistic interventions, are calling attention to critical questions. What can the museum become when it sees us to be an after-image of coloniality? And how can we use this moment of protests, strikes, and direct actions at museums as counterpoints to the ossification of Western art institutions? In other words, what would it mean for an art institution to genuinely engage with notions of restitution, animism, and diasporic placemaking? So, finally, returning to the mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mati de Ops, Atlantics. The non-dialectical thinker and philosopher Edward Glissant speaks about the transparency of the cinematic image. What is left outside the frame is critical. He states that the Atlantic is a mausoleum. It forces us to find ourselves in relation with the other. And as Dean Hake noted, Tavia Nyong'o describes Afrofabulation as, and I quote, the ghost note, the unplayed note that is virtually heard by the trained and expectant here. The mid-Atlantic ridge, the longest mountain range on the planet, is situated on the ocean floor between Africa and the Americas. And it is the ghost note for the birth of racial capitalism and the partition of the planet. It cannot be captured by satellite imagery, submerged deep below the water surface, hidden by 500 years of history, yet to be carefully excavated. Our work for the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled Reconstructions, Architecture and Blackness in America, curated by our very own Mabel Wilson, Sean Anderson, focuses on the overlaps between Atlanta and the Atlantic. The curators commissioned 10 artists and designers to produce work that analyzes how anti-blackness has and continues to shape 10 American cities. The current legacy of the show is the formation of the BRC, the Black Reconstruction Collective, which is a nonprofit organization started by the 10 of us to provide funding, design and intellectual support for the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora. I won't reiterate this, but I stated earlier my transatlantic move from Addis Ababa to Marietta, Georgia felt like falling into the rift that exists between Africa and the Americas. And I left the comfort of a gibby and a bustling African capital and entered into a quiet subdivision in a northern suburb of Atlanta. But my move was also an embodied transformation and transition from a distant and relatively abstract understanding of one's place in the world to a direct confrontation with the hierarchies that shape and maintain it. Architecture tends to concretize existing regimes of power. Thus, its commitment to measurement and transparencies always already tied to subjugation and control. Peter Gordon's etching of Savannah, Georgia in 1734 establishing the colony of Georgia in America is an explicit depiction of this tendency. His etching can be read as a foundational diagram for the spatial practices of settler colonialism. The dispossession of land from indigenous people, the clearing of the forest that was eventually followed by the conversion of that land into measurable units of property. These ideas operate in contradistinction to various indigenous cosmologies which for thousands of years have been predicated on the belief that land is sacred and communal. It cannot be measured, owned and divided. It requires collective stewardship and care. And these questions of property and the ways in which we measure and share the planet were fundamental to the project and measurability. So again, instead of focusing on the systems that devalue black life, we're interested in sites of collectivity and abundance, the various ways in which black people practice and measurability. But the installation we produced for reconstructions is fundamentally a prototype. It's simply the beginning of a long research project which attempts to think about and find language to represent black spatial practices that remain illegible architecture and urban design. And these are systems that are not strictly tethered to power and capital. So it's an attempt to look beyond, above and below disciplinary boundaries of measurement. And we're looking at these everyday spaces of black life which offer conditions or possibilities for the dissolution of property. We modeled the built environments in the predominantly black neighborhoods of Atlanta. And as you can imagine, by and large these are environments made of the same fragments that you've seen in most American urban and suburban contexts. Strip malls, highways and single family homes. But we wanted to start our experiments in representation by doing a series of image and material studies that conceptualize black spatial practices between flow and form. We were interested in the slow material transformations from sand to glass. And, you know, the mid-Atlantic ridge itself is very much a site for the formation of blackness. But it also prefigures a global black aesthetic. And one of the materials found on the mid-Atlantic ridge is a magnetic black sand called magnetite. And this particular finding really helped us focus our experiments. So we decided to use magnetite to model the black quotidian spaces of Atlanta. And we were working with a group of glass artists at RISD in the glass department testing various combinations of black sand with accelerators, soda ash, and glass powder. And we started this work by accepting really architecture's sublime temporality, not its pretensions of permanence. So we were also thinking about ongoing practices of refusal that transformed spaces of subjugation into spaces of black joy. I showed this image a lot. This is an image of Paperboy lost in the woods. And for us it was really interesting to think about the woods of Atlanta as spaces for black and indigenous imagination. And again following Sylvia Winter one could say it is a site that is tethered between the plot and the plantation, freedom and enclosure, fugitivity and captivity. So we were also tracing how these environments keep happening in popular culture from TV shows to music videos from and about Atlanta. And we wanted to zoom into specific spaces in the city. And these studies were experiments with the overlaps between these generic kind of chain restaurants that appear in the clearings within the forest. And the types of interactions and communities that are formed there. But we're also very much thinking about the mythical within the ordinary. And the installation is made up of two discs. One horizontal and one vertical, both six feet in diameter. The horizontal disc as I mentioned earlier is a dynamic model of everyday spaces in Atlanta. And these are a series of fragments showing in the life of a person modeled as bricks. And the magnetite sand shifts between the bricks activated by a series of magnetic robots below the glass disc. And the vertical disc is a tapestry of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, considering historic and ongoing aphrodasmic migration. And this is a detail of the tapestry documenting the slow and often painful process of converting vectors into threads. But as we were looking at the Atlantic, we were also thinking about the ways in which it is miniaturized and reproduced at the scale of the city. Atlanta was settled as a determinist for state-sponsored railway lines. So those railway lines eventually transformed into highway infrastructure. But they produced the same effect of segregating predominantly white North Atlanta from the predominantly black South Atlanta. And on the left is the detail of the horizontal disc with fragments of the city. And on the right is a detailed tapestry. This was also a really great opportunity for us to collaborate with young artists in the city. And we worked with a musician from Atlanta called Tifari Williams who composed a 24-minute soundscape one minute for every hour of the day. And this followed the loose narrative that was established to lay out the bricks on the horizontal disc. In section, the cone the bottom of the cone housed the speakers and the raspberry pie. In the top shelf were used to anchor these rails with the robots. That would be shifting the sand. And on the wall we had these two collages presenting a landscape that is somewhere between the mythical and the ordinary. Thank you. For this wonderful presentation of this very provocative body of work I'll try and say something articulate that hopefully is interesting as well. I think one of the first things is that there's there's this way in which in your work you move between the personal and the political with such seamlessness one doesn't even notice. And of course I think the instance of that I think everyone is most mesmerized by the ridge. It's fascinating that it's both ridge and rift an abyss that you fall into but also a kind of mountain that you have to scale. But I think what it does is it really reminds us that the border is not a line that you cross but really a conceptual a conceptual idea that in crossing it becomes and where once you cross that border and I have that same experience you're always bordered. You're always carrying the border with you and then you are an outsider everywhere. Always outside but then that outsiders gives you certain capacity to then speak in hopefully critical and interesting ways but it's a complicated position to inhabit this sort of bordered experience of the planet. I think one of my central sort of comment observation questions is about the way in which your work is infrastructural what I try and get at all so that I don't forget any of the pieces. What do I mean when I say that? One of the things that you bring up in your work is how capital has a way to find what is valuable and does make it vulnerable. I think you talk about that in relation to the Karyako and I've been trying to figure out how to spell it in my comment. The Karyako relationship of the market to the part and you have the drawing of that and in that sense both that and the Belt and Road Initiative occupy very normative definitions of infrastructure as that which move commodities across space but at the same time infrastructure also has a temporality to it, a very different temporality from the one that you talk about and that is I think we can talk about this temporality as infrastructure is constantly promising a better future but in the act of promising this better future it's commodifying the future it's sort of like futures or speculation and there are all of these ways that infrastructure commodifies the future before we even imagine it and there's an additional I think key to this in relation to some of the things you said is about the age of the Tanzanian and Ethiopian population that the young people and these infrastructure projects are really aiming to capitalize on that on their future both extracting and creating a market in two ways so this sort of act of colonizing the future before we can even think it is in contradiction with this other aspect of infrastructure which is that it makes this promise but it never actually fulfills that promise it's a continuously deferred promise and we know this so much because we are inhabiting the ruins the future of past mega projects which is that sort of world making post-colonial developmental moment that seized both South Asia Africa in the post-war period so here we have infrastructural projects that make these deferred continually deferred promises these promises that never pay out and in contrast to that there's a way that your work is refusing that future and instead investing in the radical uncertainty of the present I think that's really taken by this idea of uncertainty that you commit to and it I think it's to me most evident in the GP which you recognize as having a tendency to block and also having a tendency to hold and you never try to resolve that tension so in a sense that's my observation slash question which is how do we imagine this in a present rather than you know because even in our studio you're after property this is not some future right we already want to be after property so there's a sort of use of language that is future oriented but it is always turned inward and I think the one thing I want is a verb for immeasurability because to measure is a practice so when you find it we have to make it up but because you think you always talk about immeasurability as a practice not as a characteristic or I have many other thoughts but I'm going to pause over there and maybe turn it over to Malreis how should we do this you want to respond which part of the question I mean I want hey I have a question and it is that how do we invest in this radically uncertain present how do we even find languages to talk about it how would you describe that kind of condition and in a way I think what you're saying is that that's not a manifesto but that's how architectural thinking is going to it's not going to be a project of problem solving looking to make a better future because that is already a ruined project it's a ruined future so what kind of language what kind of thinking what kind of new ways do we then how do we use to inhabit this radically uncertain present question mark yeah I mean I think okay so that's that's a very hard question and I'll just start by saying I think maybe for me the uncertainty is a good way to check ourselves because even in the work that I was sharing there are moments where we feel like it's becoming complacent in response to these regimes so the uncertainty puts us in a position where we're not afraid to those to those futures but it also allows us to be a lot more agile and spontaneous and quite frankly the work that we do in Addis is an intense collaboration with a practice called Yema and they're kind of a media practice as well so they're always thinking about city the host radio shows and have these weekly debates about the future of the city so just being in conversation with them forces us to not commit to a clear answer but to somehow remain in the space of uncertainty and discomfort yeah but it's really difficult I would say because I think there are certain things that are very appealing you know when it comes to speaking about these cities and when you're talking about the infrastructure conversation in Addis there was a light rail system that was inaugurated less than ten years ago which was kind of like a huge deal you know they built it in like four years but they didn't train anyone in Ethiopia to manage it so now another five years removed the whole thing is defined so I think there needs to be ways for us to remain engaged but also maintain the space of uncertainty and discomfort well this has been an amazing lecture I want to say this to start with and in many different ways I think that it was the way you constructed the moments in which information could emerge was very carefully a stage I would say so that there was no never the impression that you were providing this kind of simple solutions right the direct solutions I think that when we look at the last work and the images that you selected to conclude are images that are sort of provided atmosphere in which it's difficult to say how successful the project of measurement is you know like it's the images are decomposing that capacity of those orders to impose themselves and the spaces and realities that you're mentioning and reflecting on seem to be kind of making their way through the kind of incapacity and failure of measurability you know and they constitute themselves as something that is actually not that transparent not that easy to explain not really something that can be explained with simple words right and I wonder what is the status of the project of property and measurability control and colonialism at this point from your point of view because it seems that your lecture is operating in the failure you I love that they was talking about the rinse of this kind of and somehow it seems that the rinse are basically what we have it and the rinse are not exactly the same that the successful project you know I have the feeling that there's a failure like it's not that we're combating something or confronting something that is incredibly successful it's that the structure of property the structure of measurability the structure of transparency are structures that are halfway and that we're inhabiting basically this failure to me what's really interesting about it is how it makes people really uncomfortable like we students some of the students from Urban Design are here today but there were some people on our panel today guest critics who were very uncomfortable with the idea of giving up property so I think there's a certain attachment that we have to property as this thing that somehow gives us stability gives us a future and lets us coexist with each other and I think when we are really seriously looking at the history and how it has shaped and maintained the current world order we know that it doesn't do that but yet we're so attached to it and it's difficult to have that conversation here it's even more difficult to have that conversation in Ethiopia so for me it becomes an entry point to begin to understand where people's anxieties are coming from and how that might shape the future of the city we don't have a silver bullet we don't have a single solution but at least from a pedagogical standpoint for us it's been interesting to one come up with multiple definitions of property but then also come up with multiple strategies and tactics to begin to dissolve the regime I think it's been a really generative environment to think about the built environment because it also shows the limits of form and materiality so yeah basically we need to come up with a new way of relating to one another and sharing space that will produce some sort of spatial practice but what that becomes five and answer four on the subject of property I think the way in which you engage the historical literature on the emergence of property regimes makes the case that property is something we designed and in that sense is it possible then to design something different because I think that's really the historical case you're making look at how we designed this world and therefore can we not design something else and it really as much as it feels impossible to have a world without property for students especially if they're coming in and not imagine that that's a thing at all or not engage that historical discourse I can see how it is but maybe it's done for a question but is there something about property that you've learned from because I think it's taught the studio like maybe three times something you've learned about property from students themselves that might be something interesting I don't know I mean we just want I think I do this we do this in my practice and there's always a certain urge to look for an anchor and that anchor has been kind of community land trust and we know the limits of that and the failures of that so I think for us it's been interesting even if we engage with the community land trust conversation very directly and engage with nonprofits that are doing that work on the ground that automatically changes the way we draw the city so at least for our purposes in the studio and in our practice our initial ambition is finding ways to image the world differently and not produce different types of interventions but even being able to see the world beyond property is a challenge and I think for the most part that's been the challenge of the studio and you know it happened mostly because we were doing this research on for the exhibition for reconstructions and we just kept running up the theme issue we know what happens to these cities we know what happens the moment you put in a park we know what happens the moment you make it accessible to mass transportation all of it causes some form of dispossession or removal and the removal is usually directed at working class black and brown people so I think that's fundamentally what forced us to begin to engage with this as an urban design issue and hopefully that will produce something else and how is I mean you're basically operating in different context in a way and that's that provides you the great opportunity to see how different contexts react to transferences of experience knowledge ideas and and I'm very curious along these lines and the question that I tell you with asking a smaller one that's to it project this possibility of turning the compound into something vertical and that it's so generous in the in between spaces and it's creating all these and be with this in the circulations and the the limits of properties and I wonder what's the way that you're negotiating with the forces that you know when you're doing a building itself and that somehow are probably the forms of resistance to property, to alternatives to property or to are more rigid in a way or kind of stronger and I wonder what is the I mean for me it would be great to know from your experience what is the way that you see opportunities for architectural practices when it comes to design buildings to operate and negotiate and challenge notions of property accumulation and even the collective right like the limits to the capacity to imagine alternative ways of collectiveness I mean to be quite frank I think that's the fundamental contradiction in our practice right now because we love buildings and we want to keep designing buildings but a lot of that work especially Bolia Rwanda was designed before we even started the research on property but it was designed at a moment where we were really looking at the good be very seriously and so now we're at this moment where we're trying to negotiate the contradiction between you know a close reading of an existing context have anything to do with property and the kind of more recent interest in thinking about property I will say we're continuing the research on the good be and now that we're continuing the research on a good be for another exhibition we're now looking at it through the lens of property so hopefully they'll produce something else but it is that's why we keep saying I feel like whenever I present our work I say our practice is committed to image making because I think that we can control and we can control the discourse around the images we make but when we were at that construction site for the apartment building I was basically discovering all of the things that we can't control so for me that's that's humbling and productive but it also doesn't mean that we don't that we have to stop doing the other work you know and that other work has hopefully helped us imagine a world beyond that apartment building and beyond the ways in which the city is currently structured but we also want to engage with the present through design so yeah I don't really have a resolution for that contradiction but that is the issue I mean it's fascinating because in Ethiopia this was an experiment that was tried that the state owns that's just that's crazy and yet property as a concept persists through kind of legal manipulations and through formal operations and sort of reemerges so there's a kind of and clearly this state owning all of the land is a clearly postcolonial model of undoing property and even at that scale of universality it's hard yeah maybe it's a good moment to open I'm sure there's questions in the audience I thank you for your lecture just one simple question the image you show before is very consistent but the color is very vibrant how you make the decision to use what color is it affected by project or like some research behind it when you produce this kind of image what is the decision in this color and scheme palette I like these types of questions so when we were working on two markets well let me step back the way we typically operate in the practice is and also similar with the pedagogy when we have a project we start gathering a set of samples and these are usually artists that we want to be in conversation with and there were a series of artists from Ethiopia contemporary artists whose images we were basically responding to through each one of the drawings but simultaneously it was also at a moment and this is maybe a disciplinary kind of question at a moment we graduated from grad school at a moment where everyone was doing these incredibly, incredibly detailed line drawings and it was kind of a demonstration of labor and I think we were both frustrated with this idea that we give it value because it shows the amount of labor required to produce an artist that we were looking at we know that it required an incredible amount of thinking and effort but it was never a demonstration of the labor so we wanted to start engaging with that way of practicing and one of the artists that we were really looking at especially for two markets was Aida Molina who's a photographer from Ethiopia and she does these contrasting backgrounds and the background embedded with some sort of cultural and political value so for us for each one of the drawings there's a narrative that we wrote that is engaging for example with the one I showed about the history of Ujama so all of the colors that we selected were either from the site or documents we gathered from Ujama so it's somehow a combination of the two but of course there's a lot of intuition as well but I would say yeah I mean I think we're trying to think about that very carefully now as well and just really being inspired by yeah like I showed Charles Gaines and the ways in which there's an aspect to the process that you don't need to reveal you know and I think there's so much to two markets and a measurability that is very difficult to talk about because it produced the thing we produced but it doesn't need to be part of the discourse so I hope that answers your question sorry so when you talk about discourse with like artists and creatives from Ethiopia to create like these wonderful pieces is there the same kind of process that goes into it is in like a discourse with the community when you're talking about building these residential buildings is there a similar type of discourse that goes on with the communities that they're being built for it's what a similar type of discourse with the communities that these projects are being built for or like even the art pieces that they're being made for um the answer is as much as we can we try the apartment building is a tricky one because it is in a particular neighborhood where all of the single family villas are basically becoming apartments so we know our three neighbors are gonna be towers in the next five years so there was kind of almost a six month long negotiation and it's hard to show in the images but basically we had to decide the percentage of opacity which is something that is negotiable so after we designed the facade we had to negotiate with each one of the neighbors to figure out how much of their lot we get a view into or we get to see so that's always part of the practice and but when we go to I want to be very clear like we're not anthropologists so when we go and work on the marketplaces it's mostly a collaboration with architects in those cities and artists in those cities we're not doing kind of oral history or ethnographic work but engaging with the documents that were produced before us and how we were responding to them so almost all of the buildings that we drew were drawn before us but they were drawn to represent a particular political agenda and we're trying to somehow shift that that is for me also very interesting because in a way you're not explaining what happens there, right? Like there's something very different of the work that these documents and these approaches do in your practice it's not really about explaining it's something different right? It's even creating lack of clarity about them, right? Like problematizing complicating the stories of these architectures that you're part of, right? Yeah It's interesting because the other day Raven Chacon was saying something similar that as part of his engagement with indigenous practices he understood that he should never explain what was happening that he would see his work as disposing it differently but not really about providing a clear interpretation that could replace the reality Yeah and that's kind of that goes back to the earlier question around uncertainty because I think there are moments where we want to explain because we're in these types of environments where we're presenting to people who don't know the space but it always feels awkward it feels I think to me it's much more productive when we're implicating ourselves and the audience than pretending as if we are watching these people, right? or these spaces but it is an urge that we have to fight because I think our training makes us want to explain makes us want to make them transparent Thank you for the lecture really compelling ways of thinking I think the conversation about property is like so evades disciplines and media so even just thinking about property in terms of not the formal but things that we own in terms of space personal space we all have been trained to take up our personal space in every seat or if someone is encroaching on your space so in terms of property as the right to own space I think it's a really provocative way of engaging with architecture with your background in your way of thinking about space that may be from childhood and the origin story that you were talking about the land is something that is collectively cared for as opposed to at the exclusion of other people it's mine so in terms of property and my space or space being owned even temporarily I wonder if you how you think about engaging in spaces like in this country and other places where it's accepted that space is owned and at the exclusion of other people so as an architectural proposition it seems that you're breaking down like upending that and so I'm looking forward to seeing how you like and do the concept of at the exclusion of other people personal space ownership of actual space it seems that that is like pulling the kind of thread out of this whole agreement that we have that is the subtext of architecture in a lot of western context so just thinking about your foray into operating in those spaces and how you think your practice will like upend that it's just like I think so upending the way that we agree that spaces are owned by people as an entry to architecture when it might not even be that definition yeah I mean one thing I just want to say is there are a lot of people thinking about this right now and I think for us it's been more about identifying fellow travelers and a lot of those fellow travelers are actually not within our discipline so finding ways to bring those ideas directly into architecture has been the ambition of the work there are people who can speak about this much more precisely and coherently than I can but just even engaging with that literature changed the way we thought about architecture so it's something that we decided to commit to as an area of research but yeah there are a lot of incredible minds out there that are writing about this sort of unpacking the history of it in multiple contexts so we're not in any way alone and yeah it's but it is challenging I mean how that applies to like Andres was asking how that applies to the buildings we're designing I don't know but we're trying to figure it out Thanks again for just echoing what everybody else said this was really fantastic and I'm wondering just given that midterms are around the corner what I really enjoyed so much about the work is actually maybe this is like building what was just said but like embracing architecture as a sort of dialogue practice and not a solution practice and again I think what really struck me is again the resolution of all the projects but resolution in terms of like the presentation and the project itself is necessarily the singular solution so at a time maybe when a lot of the students here are being asked for like an answer I'm wondering maybe if you could sort of expand on the sort of how do you know like when it's a great project even if the question is still unanswered I mean I think it's really fascinating Yeah I don't know maybe the students should answer that but I don't know if we could define questions that will lead to a certain type of failure and I think that's the space to operate in because that will allow us to extend this conversation and at least the students that are collaborating with us this semester they all felt that today we had a pin up where they presented their first ideas of a world after property which is already ridiculous so and then when you present that to an audience that has not been part of the conversation then you begin to realize the limits of your ability to communicate those ideas and how it might translate to people beyond these walls so yeah I was hoping you could speak a little bit more about kind of the weird processes of image making as a response to colonial cartographies as you spoke about but specifically the fact that you're trying to convey these messages in spaces, institutions that are largely produced by these colonial cartographies in terms of that negotiation of space and aesthetic practice and through the lens of black aesthetic liberation sorry Wow CCCP I could have guessed that that's a good disclaimer maybe you can start with that I really I don't think there's an outside basically I think what you described as these institutions is the world right now and if you want to rehearse how to dismantle those institutions from a space like this or by being an activist starting your own kind of community land trust I think we're trying to operate towards a certain goal that won't lead to more removal and more dispossession but I think I think there are zones of intensity I agree with you but I think I don't think there's an outside and this is part of what I was trying to say with the conversation around being an immigrant because for me whenever I was frustrated with the politics of this country I would just I used to be able to tell myself I'll just go back to Ethiopia and I think when you mature you realize you go there and the same issues reappear in a different form so I think just find multiple spaces to rehearse liberation and hopefully some of that will be useful but there's an outside who are in it I want to get into a question about your practice since you spoke specifically about how your practice in creating architecture is inspired by looking beyond property and questions of this kind of exclusion in particular I'm curious about if you could expand on this point about borders as exclusion versus borders as a place of meeting of different people and the reason for this is because I think while this is very possible to show in a way in graphic form or possibly in writing we rather prefigure these functions into architecture when we get a client who wants us to I mean even the idea of clients already maybe too prescriptive but in practice anyway the idea we just wouldn't call those both of those things borders we would just call those two completely different types of projects so I'm curious if that you know when it comes to what are the two I think early in your presentation you mentioned the idea of borders as exclusion or as limiting of movement versus borders as a place of meeting and I just took this as one particularly interesting example because it seems like outside of here in terms of school or outside of writing or outside of in terms of practice we would just consider those two completely different words and yeah sorry if that sounds prescriptive but I am very curious so I'll say basically some of the things I showed today are ideas we're just beginning to explore but we're trying to understand how these practices are multi-scalers so when I showed the image of the African continent it was an anthropologist who didn't want to draw the nation state boundaries right so in his mind in his time he was being radical he was saying I'm representing all of these different tribes throughout the continent and that gives you a completely different image but even in that representation he wanted to solidify the edges when we know like at least the ones that I'm familiar with do not stay within that territory those things are amorphous and you're constantly negotiating new territories and depending on resources you're moving to another place so I think just looking at that map one was jarring for me because I've always seen the image of the continent with the national boundaries and second when I started thinking about it I realized that doesn't go far enough you know because when you go into those environments especially in rural Ethiopia the ethnic boundaries are incredibly contested you know and it's not a line it's never a line and when we scaled it down and started thinking about at least you know the more pleasant experiences I had growing up in Agipi in a decent compound house that was also a situation even though there is a perimeter wall it felt like the gate was always open it felt like there were always people who are not part of the family in the house you know so we're trying to find a way to link these two scales I don't know if I have the right language yet but to me that is not about policing edges that is actually saying we're going to produce different zones and those zones should be traversed by different people right so I'm not saying yeah I don't know what the word is basically so it's not there should be a way in which we maintain difference between these zones while making sure that people are intensively engaging with one another and just to give you kind of the other extreme of it you know when I moved to Marietta, Georgia there were no fences but you would never step on someone else's lawn it was scary like basically the moment you see that line on the lawn because the neighbor is on five days before you that is the line you cannot cross so the invisibility of that edge also produced a more intense version of policing than the edge that I was familiar with where you know the wall is there but you're expected to cross it so that's kind of what we're trying to think about and I agree with you particularly especially in architecture we don't necessarily have the tools to really represent that so I think that becomes an experiment in a search maybe question there hello first off thank you for coming and thank you for your presentation I think your talk today and your work made me really think about storytelling and kind of contemporary mythmaking that you're doing just by capturing the storyline through a variety of symbols and representations that might not literally exist but can kind of tell a story through the materiality and I just think it's really interesting as a person of diaspora how you're connecting such disparate landscapes in a way that has such a clear thread like through the tapestry here with the Atlantic ridge and the sand that you used to create Atlanta it was kind of building this connection that I hadn't even thought about before in terms of the Atlantic slave trade and Atlanta as a space and I'm just curious to see like in what ways do you see that mythmaking or contemporary mythmaking as this kind of anti-colonial resistance that usually treats history as something so rigid and rational and logical and just kind of how you see this representation in your work borrowing the symbols from a variety of myths or stories or kind of lessons that people can build from if that makes sense so I mean disclaimer I think I don't know maybe I should check with Mabel because she's spent much more time thinking about Sylvia Winter's work but for me like reading Sylvia Winter is eye-opening because what it helped me understand is that we need to find new origin stories in order to move forward so part of the challenge is assuming that you have a particular origin story and that origin story is different from mine so if we accept that all of it is constructed then we need to be able to engage with those origin stories more critically and hopefully produce origin stories that produce different futures but I think storytelling is a big big part of that project because it is the gravity basically that's kind of fundamentally what's keeping us on the ground and that's also what's causing you know you can see what happened in this country with the 1619 project when you begin to address the origin story that's when people really lose their minds so I think those are the environments that we have to be willing to engage with as you know people are thinking about the built environment because the built environment as it is right now assumes that there is a clear origin story well thank you very much Emmanuel it was really amazing