 So, good morning to all. My name is Oscar Oliveira Dider, and I'm here to introduce why architecture think tank. Why is a planetary studio that questions the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of the built and destroyed environment? Founded by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author, and theorist, Cruz Garcia, and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author, and poet, Natalie Frankowski. Why is one of several collaborative platforms of public engagement that include the alternative trade school loud readers, for which they just wrapped up a session this week at the University of Puerto Rico, and the interdisciplinary collective, Osnovis. Now a team of three, since Emma was born a year and a half ago. For me, wise work provokes rather than resolve, re-hatches rather than invent, derives rather than copy. The projects and writings remind us that what is a tropical paradise for some, is a historical site of exploitation and extraction for others. They are unforgiving in the relentless pursuit of making more evident that the Caribbean is the inaugural site of capitalist modernity, and racial hierarchies. They are combative in their expressions while simultaneously poetic in their aesthetic experimentations. In this process, the postcolonial is re-hatched into emancipatory imaginations, what they call a postcolonial imaginary. Puerto Rico today, where I'm also from, is a site of unjust depth, culture of capitalism, and premature death. Garcia and Frankowski warn us that we are at the dawn of yet another round of renaugural models of human exploitation and land extraction. Puerto Rico and the broader global south as a testbed of late capitalism and a global necroputure. In light of this, why proposes new postcolonial futurisms against and within the mantle of necropolitics? These new models of aesthetic and ideological iconography establish both historical and contemporary connections to anti-capitalist underground cultures. For example, the radicalism of early 20th century tabaco lectores, or loud readers, and the 2019 perreo combativo are constructively extracted from as speculative scenarios of utopianism in all the expressions of regard, science fiction, and now as postcolonial imaginations. Garcia and Frankowski teach at Iowa State University, where they are associate professors and design of critical futures and activism and emancipatory practice respectively. Their work has been part of exhibitions at Center Pompidou Metz, Noyes Museum, Nuremberg, the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the inaugural Chicago Architecture Urbinali, and the Venice Architecture Urbinali. They are authors of a manual of anti-racist architecture education, narrative architecture, a clinical manifesto, pure hardcore icons, a manifesto on pure form and architecture, the upcoming book, Universal Principles of Architecture, 100 archetypes, methods, conditions, relationships, and imaginaries, and co-editors of the Journal of Architectural Education issue on reparations and an informal journal issue on networks of solidarity. Please help me in giving a warm welcome to Emma Driesarix, Natalie Frankowski, and Cruz Garcia. Thank you. Thank you. So thank you very much for the beautiful introduction. We are, people say this all the time, but we're truly happy to be here, right? It's our third year teaching here. And the first time that we got an email from Andrés saying, you know, your work is really important for us in Colombia. We would like you to welcome you to teach here. We were like, Andrés Haken knows who we are, first of all, that was the first question we asked. And the second one, we were like, are they really interested in what we are doing? And then after being here a couple of years and seeing being surrounded by really fantastic faculty and students that, which we maintain a really incredible relationship through the years, then we understand what he meant. So thank you very much. Today's exhibition, sorry, not the exhibition, it's a lecture, it's called Not a Test Lab or Nos somos un laboratorio de pruebas loud reading, spirals and post-colonial methods. Are we gonna start with a couple of bibliographical notes or what we call a conceptual, theoretical and practical project we call life, right? And how somehow everything we do is embedded between our life and practice. And when people say like, what do you do? It becomes every time more difficult, but I would say like, a way to summarize it is like question, power, and that pretty much sums up what we are about. So part one, history doesn't exist. There is no past or prey in this vision of history that is not linear or theological, but rather moves in cycles and spirals and sets out on a course without neglecting to return to the same point. The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear. The past future is contained in the present. The regression or progression, the repetition or overcoming of the past is at play in each conjunction and is dependent more on our acts than on our words. This is a quote by Sylvia Rivera-Cousy-Kanky and Shihina Akach with Heewa, Reflection and Practices of Decolonization. And what we're gonna do is, we're gonna introduce a bunch of images. Probably you shouldn't count them, right? Because it's a lot. But you will see how the presentation itself is not really linear. We're gonna start with something and end with something and pretty much they are all the same. Some things may look like far away for some at home for others, but they are all embedded in the same discourses, right? And I want also to add that today you'll have two loud readers and also one loud reader loud players. So Emma and me will be the loud readers of this session and loud players, too, I guess. So we are Natalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia and Emma Jussariks, as Oscar mentioned. And this really important, even conceptually, right? Like, since our baby was born, we had the chance to, at the call of Aleppo Lambert to write a letter to her for his issue on the land from settler colonial property to land back where we could explain to her the origins of her name, right? Emma from Emancipation and Jussariks with the Taíno Afrofuturist origins, right? This also allowed us to think in the same way that you see the table with the bit of a mess that we tried to create, right? In solidarity with Palestine, what's happening there and the ongoing struggle in Puerto Rico, all the images that we create, the construction of images through archival material that is trying to tell a story that is not the story that we've been told, right? Understanding that history doesn't exist, but history are narratives constructed by the powerful and for those that have access to the means of production and reproduction, right? So that's something that is really important for us in the way that we try to understand what is the legacy and the relationship between the systems of power and how story is narrated. We finished school, this is a bit revealing about our age, but we finished school in 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis. This is us 15 years ago. This is the last time I wore jeans. We were in a suit that had a jacket. I don't even know where that came from. It probably was my brothers. We were here in Brussels in the capital of Europe wondering how do we end up here in this practice that is exploiting our labor, not paying us and we're doing all the projects basically, right? We were like saying to us, if we ever do architecture in a studio, we will never replicate this practice, right? We want to have something different. This is a map of the first 14, 15 years of our practice, right? I come from Rio Piedras in Puerto Rico and Natalie comes from Juan in France, born in Dundee in Scotland. And in the first years of our life, we live in Brussels, we moved to Amsterdam, moved to Beijing where we live seven years, then moved to Taliesin, Taliesin West in Wisconsin, Lincoln, Pittsburgh, Blacksburg, New York, Aims and so on and so forth. You get a bit of the idea. This is a map that we developed to try to understand our practice. So today's presentation relates really closely to this. It's the models of action, the places, the models of interest, the practices, we think tank here, post-node is there, intelligentsia gallery there, loud reader somewhere, right? And how all these things are constantly in flow with each other, right? The mask is also a Begigante mask, which is, you will see it if you Google it, it's a traditional sort of artifact that is used in the festivals in Puerto Rico that connect not only to the colonial history with Spain, but also to the African heritage that is trying to kind of address. Again, we live in Beijing for seven years. So we went from living in a city of 20 million people, being in community in a really quick process of modernization. We used to live in Don'trumen. For those of you that are familiar with Beijing, we used to have a gallery in Beijing Xiao. This is our apartment in Dongyang, Wanghutong. And this pretty much summarizes our life when we were there, right? There was no space for nothing else than whatever you were doing at the moment, right? The production of stuff, of ideas, of manifestos, of painting. Before Emma, we used to have a couple of rabbits that live in the apartment with us. That's a Yakipanda. And then there was a Blinky Pasha, Ponyo, and two chickens. One of them said it was called chickpea and the other one was called Doris, right? So it was like life in its most intensity, right? We would do events at home too. We used to run a gallery also, right? This is Blinky and Pasha. So we went from living in a city of 20 million people, to waking up the next morning in the middle of Wisconsin, in what is now known as Taliesin, or the Frank Lloyd Wright, whatever you call it. They changed the name like 20 times already. That's the barn that he built for his uncle. So that's where we stayed when we teach there. We went there to teach. So we woke up, not only in the middle of the United States geographically, but also in the middle of the construction of the architectural genius of the white man that is gonna save the world through architecture, right? We had to deal with this history as we were teaching there. People were there just because they wanted to learn about Frank Lloyd Wright. So you can imagine when we came there, it's like I don't care about Frank Lloyd Wright, how violent he got the first couple of months. However, we survived on like many people that lived there before. There was a very intense relationship with the history of the place, right? So what we wanted to do was challenge that idea of the, again, the singular author, the male genius that is gonna transform the world, right? Through his genius, right? And what we wanted to do was create other forms of education within this place, right? Because we were there and somehow we didn't have a ticket to go back to Beijing yet. So we had the chance to work with our students in the production of new publications. Remember this one, Andres happens to be in the cover of his work on Ikea disobedience. We asked the students, can you look at something else that is not Frank Lloyd Wright? Can we look beyond the constraints of these architectures that are around us, right? We work with high school students. Our students did some magnificent thesis that didn't necessarily replicate what was there but actually question it and so on, right? And somehow I end up in this documentary with the most problematic title ever created. We are being critical of Frank Lloyd Wright but BBC didn't care and they call it Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who built America. So there goes one year of work down the drain. Our educational practices are not only concerned with university students or with adults but also we work a lot with children, right? We believe that education of architecture of the environment, of space, of ideas is something that should be accessible, right? Across generations. So we work not only with workshops in schools but we make children's books or installations, right? Like this is one of our favorite project ever, the Palace of Megaliths that we did in Shenyang. Maybe not the most sustainable project ever but totally fun and totally worth it. Children were allowed or invited to perform the design of their environment for a couple of days. You should have seen the face of pure happiness and joy as they were able to transform everything. Funny thing is that every time an adult went here they were freezing from the blocks because they feel like, should I touch this or not? While the children are constantly transforming everything. While working with students, I'm showing you this not only because it's a student project but to see how teaching for us is such central part of what we do. This in 2020, right? 2020 now is one of those years, 1968, right? Like so much things happening in 2020. People lost family. People were marching in the streets, right? We were confined. We didn't know what was gonna happen with the rest of our lives, right? At the same time, earlier than this, we were teaching already a studio on the lectores or loud readers, facing Puerto Rico. Students here already were asking questions about what does it mean to have an education of art about black emancipation, right? Or what does it mean to design for protest, right? Can we teach a faculty where people learn how to protest, to learn how to manifest publicly, right? Or where people are researching about the role of surveillance in society. This all happening before the summer of 2020, right? So you can feel that there was already, they were taking the polls of the time, right? In the same way that, but when it's gonna do later. Students thinking about what is the relationship to land reclamation, right? To the production of land. All this in the setting of Puerto Rico, right? And later on here in Columbia, with the first studio we taught of a great loud reading is in the making, but no one has noticed. How the students use architecture, not as a device, to perpetuate the systems of power and oppression, but rather question the role of institutions in this. Institutions like MoMA, like the MET, or even Columbia University, right? In their own relationship with the neighboring Harlem. Most recently, also some of our students make some incredible works. Like this one was very, giving a preview about what's about to happen. What happened in the MET, he, Chris and I piece to go mall, or Ted, he researched about the footprints of these artifacts from Cambodia that were stolen and they've helped finance the Cameroosh during the Cambodian genocide, right? And as he was researching this, many of the activities went into the MET, like a month after he presented this and they confiscated the artifacts, right? So there was a very clear reading of the relationship of power and politics on that, right? For us, teaching is like another form of medium, right? Mediums that include publication, that include artifacts, that include a history of visual, of auditive or of artifacts that are not necessarily modern or pre-modern, but rather they are all embedded in time, right? That to us, that translates in the production of many, many different publications. Since the first zines that we published on our own when we were in Beijing and we had to ship it all around the world and it would be so costly and we were like, why are we making this? This makes no sense, right? But it was an urge to find a way to have a discourse that is being exchanged to maybe later publications with publishers, like some of them that we introduced. The first exhibition we did in Beijing that was self-commissioned, we didn't even know if people were gonna come, right? That was in 2010 or 2011, if I recall. Two more institutional exhibitions that allow us to present these ideas, like the first installation in the Chicago Architecture Biennale in the Cultural Center or how this works developed into books, like the one we share with you of a narrative architecture, a clinical manifesto, right? That allow us to create a theory for a form of practice, right? Architecture not only as a way of using representation to sell a project but actually to question the history and the legacy of ideology in architecture, right? This narrative architecture book where you have your reading of the post-colonial prose, right? Again, engaging with history to the form of the medium of the book, right? Other projects like this, really all collage we made to investigate a genealogy of ideal cities in architecture, right? By cutting and assembling a bunch of ideal urban plans that evolve in different forms of collages at different scales, right? We're trying to map the legacy of ideal urban thinking, right? Starting with a show in the maps in Lisbon that was of modest size, I had to say. I don't know why this project keeps getting bigger and bigger, maybe because of urban ambition to a second show we did in during 2020 or 2021 in the newest museum in Nuremberg where the installation got much bigger to the most recent one in the Centre Pompidou Mets in France where it was on the biggest hanging wall of a museum in Europe. So I don't know what are you gonna do next, maybe build the city. It's a very beautiful exhibition. We have a chance to take part and also visit with our students and alone on utopian science fiction, right? And what was beautiful about it is how different forms of futurism and literature and architecture were all embedded together. Unfortunately, it's over since April so you cannot see it anymore, but it lives in our memories. That's us with some of our students from Iowa State that we brought there. And also, for example, this book is coming in October and it's a book where a commercial publisher approached us with a simple, they have read the manual of anti-racist architecture education and they came up with an idea. We have an idea for you. Would you be interested, we have this series of universal principles of design, graphic design. Would you be interested to do one about architecture? And we came up with a hundred principles, archetypes, methods, relationships that we tried to be, so you don't have to read Qing anymore or any of those kind of generic theory books by Frampton and so on, right? Where we actually put, we try to give the same value to things about ecology or race or gender, disabilities, like for example, a feminist city or a post-colonial architecture where we write a hundred principles and make a hundred images for each one of them, right? So anybody that picks up a book that wants to learn about architecture is not only gonna learn about order and columns and symmetry, but also what does it mean to have an anti-racist planning or queer cartographies, right? Or building construction moratorium or what are planetary architectures, right? That relates again to other books that we don't like the pure hardcore icons that try to explore the role of form making an architecture and how power always understands form but somehow we accuse of those that maybe don't have the same access to power to being informal, right? That's something that we hear a lot and I was always interested, no, I want to have control of form too, right? A form that comes from below or from everywhere, right? A global majority of form, we'll say. For this book, we made a bunch of collages. We designed the book too and it was published first in English by Artifics Books on Architecture in London. This is a long time ago, like 2013 or 14. That's the first appearance of my tattoo of the arm, as you can see. And most recently, we are really proud and happy. After many years, we wanted to make the first edition in Chinese and English because we live in Beijing and then the publisher in London told us, no, we don't do Chinese. So we were like, disappointed. But with a friend, Chen Hao, that is based in Shanghai, one of our longtime collaborators, kept insisting and he got picked up by the biggest publisher of books in China, which is China, Building and Architecture Press. And they thought, this book is gonna make us no money compared all the codes books that we sell. So you can do whatever you want. It's not a business project. So they also let us design the book, which we had to alter a bit because somebody have told us from the publisher that our graphic design looked like Chinese funerary aesthetics. So we have to kind of adapt some things about the design of the project. We have shown this in an exhibition in 2014, as you can see in a factory in Beijing Design Week. It got translated to German also by Arch Plus for their 40th anniversary. That was a double issue. These things like before anybody knows who we are. So it's like we get the work out there and it's like kind of anonymous in a way. We have a chance to do a show in Berlin also with Arch Plus and also the chance to translate some of those ideas into pavilions and other sorts of projects. This one, a poetry book we published in Seville around 2015, where we were exploring, again, language. It's like a colonial, a post-colonial question of language. Is there a language that can be universal? I love when Andres texted me about Reven Chacon's lecture. And I saw the lecture and he said, you're gonna like this. And I really love the lecture. Seeing how he uses all these geometric forms to try to establish a different vocabulary that is not the colonial music vocabulary. So I think this relates to that, how we use words and forms as a form of exploration to performance, to form-making, sometimes in paper, sometimes in space. We were much younger here. Again, all these forms and how they translate in three dimensions in the museums, in the galleries, and how this translates to some failed project that we were one of the finalists to design, one of the 10 finalists to design the largest museum in Europe. That happens to be in Moscow. It was a half a million square feet, 42,000 square meters project between both of us, which is a big project. The idea, I'm not gonna talk about the project, but I want to say is that when we lost, we were competing against famous people, like Arabena and Ghetto Sovejano and so on. It was all politics at the end. We learned a lot. One of them is that if you don't have political power, sometimes it's a bit difficult to compete in these settings. When we finished, I was really sad when we went back to Beijing, because it was the only chance we were gonna get and we missed it. But the idea of having a museum that is open to the public informs something that became really important and that is gonna influence a later project. When we came back to Beijing, we started Intelligencia Gallery. That was our anti-profit exhibition space. Here, even if artists sell work, there was no commission for the gallery. It was a completely non-commercial endeavor that became a really important art space in China at the moment, where the market was so strong that there was no space for discourse necessarily. We would make exhibitions, like three exhibitions per month and sometimes 35 solo exhibitions in 35 days, which is a terrible idea if you want to sleep, especially if a performance artist wants to do a 24-hour performance in one of those 35 days. We would do all these exhibitions. There were mostly group shows with artists from all around the world, from Africa, Latin America, China, and so on, in a very small space. And later on, we'd get started getting invited to do exhibitions in larger spaces and museums, in cultural centers, all with the same anti-capitalist program, right? As you can see in some of these pictures. These are a great piece of work, I'm saying duet, duet, duet, duet, duet, duet, duet, right? That is yes, yes, yes, or right, right, right. They mean the same kind of, by a filmmaker, right? So all the artists, you and she, that is a kind of known filmmaker, will work in different media, right? Another anecdote that is quite funny, this got censored in another show because it should be the little sticker that you put when you sell a painting, but somebody thought it was a Japanese flag, so they banned it. Some person banned it, right? There were like a Jubo Gong showing a work from Mongolia that says the dream is over, carved in marble, or Jason Mena that is a Puerto Rican artist based in Mexico City, working with the vocabularies of the underground market, right? Like, good as gold is a phrase that comes up everywhere. At the same time, we were creating shows that were exploring things about time and history, or I think like in a very contemporary way, this exhibition about control and language called New, New, Speak that we showed in around 2015, well, so many years already. Zero 10, celebrating the anniversary of the Zero 10 exhibition of a Suprematism in Art, and a non-objectivity with artists from Russia, from Latin America, again Africa, China, and maybe this is the last part of this, the last project of this first part, and this again connect to the last project we're gonna be showing. It's a very important project of ours right now, where we're building a house for one of our most important poets, trans poet called Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, and using, Roque was the, we're the title of the Whitney show of the Neyim Puerto Rico Post-Uracan. We took one of his books on the tertiary, the third thing that gives value among two things, that's a Marxist term, but also we can think about gender when we think about the tertiary, a gender that is not in the binary, not male nor female. We also wanted to think in the architecture what happens when the house is a house for transitions, a house that is looking to the context, we work with the history of the place, this ongoing, we are now about to start construction, at some point soon, working with the materials of the place, and also to the geographies, but also what is interesting about the house, that's only two doors in the whole house, that is the bathroom doors, everything else is about transitioning from one space to the other, right? And we have these spaces, the tertiary spaces, there are not necessarily a room, or a bedroom, or anything, right? So it's a constant circulation space for a very important part of ours, and also somebody we admire, right? It's also a symbol for people that want to return to the island, but I won't get into details. But what is important is that you will see how working on other projects leads to this type of project of architecture. Not all. Critique de la raison postcoloniale. C'est pourquoi les analyses marxistes doivent être toujours légèrement distendues, chaque fois qu'on aborde le problème colonial. Il n'y a pas jusqu'au concept de société pré-capitaliste. Bien étudiée par Marx, qui ne demanderait ici à être repensé. Marx's analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem, everything up to and including the very nature of pre-capitalist society. So what explained by Marx must here be thought out again. This is a really important thing, right? We tend to over-rely a lot on cultural analysis that comes from empire, right? And oftentimes the perspective from the postcolonial world, if I want to call it, if you want to call it that way, people are missing a great chance to understand what's happening by not looking into the columns, right? This is a paper we wrote a couple of years ago. We have to say that we published about Bonnie before the New York Times did, just in case. When Avery Review invited us to address something about land in an issue about empire and land, we came with the idea of explaining what loud reading was. Loud reading was still a new project. I haven't mentioned it yet. I haven't explained it to you, but you will see soon what it is. But it consists on loud reading, right? It's a practice that starts in the tobacco factories in Puerto Rico. In the beginning of the 20, oh, actually it starts in Cuba, but it spreads in the Caribbean. And it's very important in the tobacco factories in Puerto Rico. And it's because people are loud reading forms of political theory, right, to people. So they help unionize, organize, ask for better rights, and so on. We wanted to understand what it doesn't mean to loud read today. Puerto Rico has just ousted, right, at this flag that is here, is the black revolutionary flag in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has just ousted for the first time a governor in this 500-year colonial history. Do you know about Bonnie? Somebody knows about Bonnie. Okay, this is about Bonnie. This is before COVID, right? For us, but Bonnie came from the future and he was in the center of the revolution, right? There was something about loud reading, right? This manifestos, and again, he says anti-patriarchal, feminist, lesbian, trans, Caribbean, Latin American. I feel like that encompasses the manifestos that we need to follow today. Why? Because trans discourse, anti-racist discourse, anti-colonial discourse, addresses everything that is urgent. Everything to deal with the ecology, everything to deal with people, right? This poem by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera explains quite well what happened with COVID even before it happened. He says here, hey Gringo, if you love death so much, why don't you marry it? Here, 4,645, which is the unofficial death count of people in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, people that were not even counted. The government and media were saying that 13 people died for weeks, right? So when this number came out, it was not shocking to some, right? But it's a very brutal revelation of a system of oppression that dates back to the creation of the plantation. Who's this? And my students cannot answer because you know already. Who's this? How is she called? Is she a Colombian? Yes, that's Columbia, Gringo, right? Who is she? Do you know this picture? What is happening here? Somebody wants to describe it. What do you see? Right, there's a white woman with a school book, there's technology, there's New York back here, right? There's agricultural technology that all these colonizers are bringing. Indigenous people are being pushed out into the darkness far away from the light of God, right? That's the narrative of Columbia, right? Are you saying, are you telling you this? So you find another place to take a picture in your graduation. Because she is very problematic. So was the relationship of that to this, right? Black Lives Matter, the destruction of ecologies, right? Why supremacy being completely unashamed, right? How do they intersect? What are the architecture, what is architecture? How architecture as an infrastructure help us understand this, right? Understand that it's not only a thing about styles, right? Like this is some like, you know, classical architecture. But that also happens in modernist architecture, right? This is not a football celebration, right? This is the protest when Jair Bolsonaro got kicked out by the voters of Brazil. We have on one hand, the neoclassical architecture and the other one, another form of architecture of power, right? We're really interested in understanding this. What is the relationship of the singular male author that is gonna save the world through very clear answers like, yes, it's more. I have no idea what that means yet and that's what's polished like 20 years ago. I'm working with people that hate indigenous people. I openly raised these politicians like Jair Bolsonaro, right? They're saying like, all these indigenous people are staying in the middle of development, right? We should get rid of them like this, like Cava did before. These are literal quotes from the newspapers, right? It is a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn't been as efficient as the Americans who exterminated the Indians. So what happens when we have architects defending these relationships, right? When we talk about ecology, we can never forget about people, right? The eco-fascist discourses that, yeah, this is the problem of the people that have created this. It's not all the people that created this, right? Many of us have been the subjugated in these processes. So what happens when architects propose to redesign Earth to stop climate change with his master planets or being mass proposing to cover the entire planet with an inhabitable biostructure? Isn't that what planet Earth already is? I don't know if I should explain this anymore. A couple of months ago, people can still defend him but I don't know if that's possible today, right? What is the relationship of extraction, you know, as Andres showed very beautifully in his project in Venice of extraction with politics, right? But the architectures of destruction. What is the role of labor in all of this, right? These are the things that really concerned us. Not only architects as a working force, but architects as part of a larger working force, right? Not as a white-collar worker. For us, it's always been a relationship of understanding what is the legacy, right? And what are the things that Kusikankia firms are moving spirals, right? These are pictures that are separated by 50 years, Baltimore in 1968 and Baltimore in 2020. And you can see that not much has changed. Where are our icons? Is it the singular male genius that is gonna save the world, right? If we have progress, you know, at least I don't have to lecture behind a bulletproof glass. And understanding what the post-colonial means to us. The post-colonial for us is not what happens after the colony, right? We're not a colony anymore. We're good now, no. Puerto Rico has been a colony since 1493. I even forget the year. It's a lot, right? What happens, the post-colonial for us with the hyphen in the middle, right? And this is against what the humanities used to define it. The post-colonial is what happens when the regions of brutality, cruelty, extraction, capture and predation, precarity, austerity, that were the norm or are the norm in the plantation become the norm everywhere else. What happens when here is the colony? When you cannot run away anymore from hurricanes because they're not only affecting the Caribbean. When not only our people are dying in a hurricane without being counted, millions are dying because of COVID, because of the same reasons. The world is post-colonial, right? Achille Bambé talks about the becoming black of the world. We call it the becoming Puerto Rico of the world, right? These are two news, right? We can see the relationship between these things, you know? The mass graves are not separated anymore. One is in New York, the other one is in the Amazon. So again, what are our manifestos? What are the points we're trying to make? How do we learn from past struggles, you know, from the struggle in Vieques? From what's happening in Palestina right now? Who are the people that are giving their lives, right? To protect our future. What is our role as architects? Where are we standing? Are we standing with private property? Understanding that there's, sometimes this is against dignified life or even access to having one, right? What happens when architects try to define architectures of oppression as designing for human rights and a most just world, right? This is literally taken from HLK's webpage, right? What are those architectures of separation? And what are the real implications? I mean, we all breathed this a couple of days weeks ago, right? The postcolonial is here, but who's protecting the world? What are the truly democratic forms of architecture, right? I would say like, this very democratic in the way that the people are bringing down monuments that were never democratically erected, right? Monuments to fascists and racists and white supremacists. So where do we go from here? Can we have critical pedagogy as a form of activism, right? I have the chance to go on the streets, right? And talk about architecture to people that are not architecture students, right? But also in the way of transforming pedagogy as a practice of liberation, right? We used to teach professional practice class in Virginia Tech. And within the lecture series we have there, we have a lecture series that was called Activism as Practice, where we have architects, but also activists to come and talk to people, how they can make an artistic practice that is based center on activism, right? How do publications may allow us to address some of the inequities and inequalities of our discipline, right? The manual of racist architecture education that tries to question the legacy of modernist education, right? Again, with the singular male genius that is gonna transform the world, right? This is a transcription of the Bauhaus, what they let women and men study, right? They couldn't do architecture nor anything that was in three dimensions because women, according to Gropius, couldn't think in three dimensions and so forth, right? What happens when we have a legacy from that system of education? If anybody has done that white cube in first year, you've been learning about a white supremacist project that comes from Johannes Eaton, right? When he made the students in the Bauhaus design the house for the white man, right? Because formal purity, in this case, led to racial purity and that led to eternal life. I don't know what he was smoking, right? That's, right? So even Johannes Steffan Truby's work on right wing spaces, what happened when right wing spaces are the architecture school? What do we do with them? What happens, you know, we live in Iowa most of the year where most of our syllabus is illegal. So since two years ago, we started writing our syllabus like poetry. So nobody can blame us for our teaching, right? This is real, I'm not speculating. People are going after critical race theory, right? So we're trying to map this in the manual through the spiral of ecological justice, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and try to intercept every form of knowledge through this, right? When we published this first free online, it was downloaded around 30,000 times into weeks, which means that there was a real need for such a document, right? It didn't exist until 2020, right? We even talk about tuition fees. We're sitting in a very expensive place, right? What does it mean for the people of Harlem, for example, that they cannot study here, right? How do we map the history of architecture again in relationship to extraction, in relationship to occupation of the land? How do we turn this as a creative practice, right? Or artistic practice or architectural practice. In the construction and reading of all these landscapes of genocide of the Hudson River School. If you go to the med, you will see them. And you will read a label that says, this painter went to Paris and train and so on, so on, he traveled to the west. And sometimes you will find a blue label written by an indigenous family saying, this is the murder of my family, right? This is what they're depicting, right? You have two contrasting narratives. One of them, official history. The other one, something questioning it, right? We take a lot of these images in order to construct what we call post-colonial rooms, right? This is the first installation we did in Nebraska where we insert militarized architectures in these empty landscapes to remind us about their violent past, right? As you can see in these images. We also co-founded with a couple of former students and colleagues from different disciplines, post-novies, right? We have a collective that learns from the tobacco factories in the Caribbean. We talk about it a bit already. But where tobacco workers were denied any means of formal education, they would pick one of their own that knew how to read, to read for them during the entire workday. At the beginning it was classics what they were reading. But later on, the practice by people like feminists and arco-syndicalists and Ethiopian author Risa Capetillo would loud read not only Marx and Engels and Kropotkin and Bakunin to teach about communism and anarchism but also her own utopian fictions of workers robbing a bank and living happily ever after in the countryside, eating delicious vegetarian meals, right? But she helped foster a collective imagination, right? These are some of the members of our collective, including the youngest one, Emma Juizadix and a couple of professors and artists based all around the world, in Vienna, in the US, Puerto Rico. A couple of the post-colonial propaganda, like the one we're sharing here with the newspapers and some of the first installations we have done, right? But we wanted to loud read this anti-capitalist, anti-colonial syllabus in public, right? Always with tropical plants in relationship to all these displaced natures, right? These are a couple of us loud reading manifestos. Other lectures like this one that we did in Carnegie Mellon we turned it into an installation of post-novies or even collective projects creating a play during COVID in a 360 screen. It was very difficult to travel at the time so we were figuring out ways to work hybridly. Collective publications like A Planetary Wretched, a post-colonial narrative architecture poetry book. You have some of the acts of the play. When our students collaborate across different universities to make these post-colonial murals, these students from Virginia Tech, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Berkeley, right? Three land-grant universities addressing the land-grant footprint, collaborating with artists working with some of these questions in exhibitions like The Planetary Wretched or more recently Unpayable Depth that we held in Iowa State. Some of the propaganda to recruit people and an installation we did last year. A great loud reading is in the making but no one has noticed in magazine in Vienna where we turned one of the rooms into a flooded stage with the Caribbean motifs and another one into a reading room for spreading anti-colonial propaganda. So loud reading events. And this relates to a platform and this is an invitation to all of you because this is 2020 when in March we founded in the need of providing free and accessible education at a moment where many universities were closing their doors to students, create a platform online where we can offer lectures and workshops for everybody. All you need to do there is go online, we run a trade school, we have a couple of sessions, a couple of people here like Ivan and Dres and some others that we're going to get also at some point, hopefully, these are some of the speakers, there's an image there missing, I don't know why. I don't know who's missing. But these are some of the speakers that we have, people that you have here in lecture series too, some of the faculty here too and some of the events, right? Over 70 sessions already in the trade school or what we call a trade school. You can do simple workshops like how to make a post-colonial landscape by taking a Columbus statue and decapitating it and throw it in the lake. You can follow step by step. So we teach Photoshop to people. These are Bob Ross, but post-colonial. These are some of the sessions online and what we wanted to do is to replace the canon of theory, right? For something that really is much more helpful for us, right? Thinkers that are really helping us to think about the really important questions we are facing today, right? And most recently, just to wrap up, we have the chance to run a pilot in person for the first time at the support of Mellon Foundation where we run a program that was afro and gay and queer and lesbian and trans and diasporic and Caribbean and Latin American, anti-colonial, anti-perialist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, collective, emancipatory, anti-abelist, and solidarity, right? These are all words that came from the event and from the participation of people where we had the chance to invite people from a really broad diaspora of Caribbean practices, right? I don't know if you noticed, but in Venice it was supposed to be the African diaspora and the colonization and there were zero participants from the Caribbean, which for me is an insult, right? Like we're the blueprint of the plantation. So in honor to our absence from everything else, we decided to make everything about the hyper-presence of the Caribbean in the forms of making, in the forms of sharing. I mean, this is not planned parallel to that, but it's kind of funny that it takes place at the same time. Not only we have participants from everywhere to offer lectures that they also participate as students, but also we have students literally coming from everywhere, like French Guyanese, young architect flying from Paris, or a Bolivian student living in Canada flying also to Puerto Rico, right? These are some of the participants of the program, including Mark Raymond of Flu, 40 hours from Johannesburg to be there in San Juan, and what happened through the next 10 days, through an installation that we collectively designed with post-novies, we had the chance to create a model of an alternative, accessible school that centers in the imaginaries of the Caribbean, right? We turned a gallery space into a workshop, a library, and a space for world-making. These are some of them. So, as you know, the natures of the tropics are always taken out of context to make these still lifes, right? We wanted to make a still life that was political in the sense that we were addressing and controlling what it meant, right? So, as Julio Ramos explained in the last day, the tropics of the Caribbean were very different from what it meant in the sense that the tropics of the Caribbean and Julio Ramos explained in the last day, the tropical garden designed mostly by a German architect and by, with the idea of the Eurocentric form of knowledge that the University of Puerto Rico is, was transformed by a garden that was controlled with the discourses that are originated from the Caribbean, right? These are some of the images of the installation, and it started all with a series of mappings, for example, we painted a blackboard where we could map the places of origin as well as our fields of action of an interest, right? That was the first exercise where everybody's mapping where they come from and what are the fields of interest. This is going to be part of a series of publications and a series of really incredible workshops like a participation as an antipatriarchal pedagogy that involves the body, right? Many different types of body, disabled, able, children, adults, different genders, non-binary people. Again, these are some of those events. They are all led by the loud readers. There are also students in each of the presentations, so it's a non-hierarchical space. I'm going to open up my phone if you need to really express it. And for me... Right? And having, for example, Julie Kerr joining us for IT or Isla City Lab from Kingston, Jamaica, and I love this because I think it really encompasses what many of us feel. Being an architect in Haiti means taking place in a foreign-dominated decision-making spaces. It means taking up space. Nothing here really importantly. It means taking or grabbing a seat at a table where you are often not invited even though you are the main subject of the conversation, right? This is a super important quote from her presentation. What does it mean to practice architecture in Haiti? Right? Performances by a studio LS7 of the Dominican Republic in the beach. Some of the discussions. An incredible project on translation by our trans poet, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. A workshop on the history of the... the violent and... the history of resistance and occupation in Vieques by Maracani Oliveira that is the only architect from Vieques that we know of, right? And something that she shared that is really heartbreaking is, like, out of her class of 14 or, like, 20 people in Vieques, eight of them have died of cancer already. And she's in her 30s. So this... so you know, like, we don't know all the histories, right? And this really important, even in Puerto Rico, the history of Vieques is kind of erased by the bigger island, right, the struggles that go in the media. An incredible presentation by Jason Fitzroy Jeffers. There is a Barbadian filmmaker that runs Third Horizon Film Festival. There is a film festival based on filmmakers from the Caribbean with the Caribbean as topic. And he presented five films he created from the filmmakers of the Caribbean. And the following day he presented this beautiful film that he directed called Papa Machete, about the Machete martial arts in Haiti. A secret practice of martial arts. You don't find it in Mimeo. We also... I think like this, the workshop that changed me the quickest. Nadia Hongins joined us from St. Vincent where she practices. And what is really incredible about her practice is that she documents St. Vincent under the water. What is the importance of this? She can document climate change by the lack of life, by seeing what is missing under the water, right? Documenting the people and everything. And we had not only the chance to listen to her and learn about it, about how her amazing practice is so transformative, but also she taught us how to go in the water with a camera and look at the life there in front of us. And it took me like one minute to get in the water and then everything changed for me, right? Everything that I was missing just by going there with a waterproof camera, literally just one feet and seeing the life and how can that be transformed by everything we do down there, right? Mark Raymond, it was a beautiful presentation about mapping, Creole mapping, right? And the narratives that come from it. And Regner Ramos with his partner from Greece gave us this beautiful workshop on queer monuments based on the Coloso Sugar Factory in the west of Puerto Rico, right? That was a digital... It's a project that they're starting, but it was a beautiful workshop that was done digitally. Our activist and writer, Yolanda Royopizarro gave a fantastic talk and workshop on lesbian, Afroqueer, Boricual activism through her work and referring to a poet of another Puerto Rican author started with naming all the women body parts. There are names after men, and it was a lot. We have also a fantastic workshop on Afro-Diasporic mapping, learning about bombas. Right? So how all the storytelling in the Caribbean is also done through music, especially when everything else is illegal. Learning about the instruments and learning about the legacy of these practices. The last couple of days in the weekend, we went to one of the libraries founded by a very important Puerto Rican writer that is one of the spaces of resistance where many of these literatures exist and it's a really beautiful space. And the last day, the penultimate day, we went to Isabella to the west of Puerto Rico to do a collective polishing of resography workshop where many manifestos were produced as a writing workshop by Christopher Ray Pérez. That is also one of the members of our collective. And we wrap up with an incredible presentation about a Puerto Rican Afro Puerto Rican activist Black Panther that's on Sostre that has a very important history in New York, in Buffalo. And we don't know much about him and we're also publishing a text, an essay by Julio Ramos that is one of our most important scholars and researchers on the topic. It was a beautiful wrapping up because it brought everything together from Capetillo to Sostre to loud readers in relationship to everything, right? Some of the publications that were produced collectively and I want to close with this quote to make new worlds collectively This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness. Other worlds are possible. Thank you. Thank you for such a provocative talk. Maybe the first question I wanted to ask is along the lines of the fact that your practice addresses this sort of question about language, as you mentioned. On your architectural language based on performance, but I'm curious to further understand how the world of landscape in your work and your explorations regarding post-colonial imaginaries. How arguably they require the images and backdrops of collinial sites of exploitation and extraction. We saw multiple images regarding that and how you both visually have a sense of nature with illustrations of botanical classification in bolero tropical and in narrative architecture technical manifesto, your historic depictions of picture x landscape serve as backdrop for your post-colonial architectural imagination. Again, the sort of imagery of manifest destiny also comes to mind. As we all know and you alluded to in the Caribbean the plantation machine imposes a system of symbols as much as an instrument of economic production. As we all know in the Caribbean the plantation machine imposes a system of symbols as much as an instrument of economic production and exploitation. And I'm somewhat quoting Jill Cassett here. This landscape was to be both the producer and the sign of colonial possession. Does your work intend to redefine this landscape or to make evident its colonial nature? Or instead to have it become a mute or inert symbol? In all of instances, colonial backdrops appear serene and peaceful in your work. Has their imperialist capacity been vanquished or have colonial practices always hidden their violent nature with aesthetic attributes? It's a great question because I think we use landscape in many different ways and I think the first one as you mentioned is the one where we question it as a tool of representation that was used in history because that was also the way to be a way of propaganda for the colonial project and what's interesting to us is that we always use it as a way to contextualize all the different discourses that we want to address because it's a testimony of this history and it's something that is a bit forgotten because what's interesting when you deal with landscape is you also have this idea of a sublime and sometimes the violence and the context that is actually behind the landscape is not as visible as in other kind of depictions so for us it's really interesting to think about that and of course in different types of work if it's more like installation or collage then the idea of reusing all the tropical plants specifically is also a way to kind of bring it back to the real context that is the Caribbean and kind of use it knowingly that you can reappropriate it because it has been taken away and used in a purely aesthetical form again it's a testimony of also the geographical and historical displacement of these plants too so landscapes could be people and I think they tell you the history of the people so it's also a way of for us to kind of unveiling that understanding the every image is political it's like some of them are obviously propaganda and some of them are propaganda but you don't notice in a way understanding the road ideas about the construction of nature again as Natalie mentioned the relationship to people it's something that is really interesting I remember being in a lecture with landscape architects and people working with Hudson River School paintings and we asked a question about the really problematic history of this and the politics behind it and they told me those paintings are not political and I was like there's a painting about genocide and occupation how are you telling me that it's not political it doesn't have flags it doesn't have the tanks there everything we decide to not show in an image is a political decision it's a decision about power that's what's really interesting to us I also have to say that we made a lot of these installations outside of Puerto Rico and outside of the Caribbean and they have a meaning there but once we did it in Puerto Rico we had a different level of reading like when Julio Ramos read in the last day he read like a full essay and basically the first part was talking about how us doing that garden there in the university was really challenging the image of the university that they wanted to construct as this idyllic tropical garden like tropicality is a device of otherness of occupations we look at the Caribbean from a different point of view we don't see it from the outside you look at it from the inside so those images of pristine beaches and wilderness and horses and never people people in struggle or emancipated or in that struggle of emancipation it tells you that there's a direct control of the narrative history doesn't exist a history that somebody is trying to tell you mostly a history of other place that is not a place where political people live but more a place for you to project whatever exotic aspirations bananas, papayas when you go to the supermarkets there's exotic fruits does that make me an exotic person because this is our stuff landscapes work like that and the history of landscape we talk a lot with our students we go to see those paintings and right now they're exploring the footprint the colonial footprint of those images and artifacts how do you go behind what is just there and the frame that you've been shown and you delve deeper into the politics and the footprint the literal footprint not only the footprint of the narrative but also the violent footprint that allowed that painting to be produced our next project after the book we're doing is a we want to work on a book about ecology about measuring the colonial footprint of stuff because I feel like to talk about carbon footprint is really not enough we're missing most of the picture when we talk about the historical violence that goes in every scale from the planet scale to the body to getting into working with people that are talking about gender and raising such a deep personal way but also structural way, super fundamental to understand what we're trying to do there's no separation between that and nature and Roque read a poem that talk about I forget Pani and it's about there's a narrative about a snake in a tree and somebody grabs the snake this is a landscape right, a landscape depiction of a snake and carves a hole in the snake to make the gender in the snake so there's a narrative about gender in relationship to the landscape we saw last year when Cyrilis Norto was here talking about the swamp in relationship to race and gender again there's no separation between them I feel like there's no people with our landscape on the other way around what we talk a lot about like there's no history there's no ecology there's no so it's always all connected so to think that one is separated or one is doesn't carry meaning or a percussion is not understanding the whole image sorry why am I doing a lecture again sorry I can't help but think of this notion of landscaping one thing is the landscape of the plantation and how that carried a very specific set of ideologies and economies but now under this logic of a real estate and tourism and all these things landscape is sort of refashioned in different terms but it still has the sort of colonial underpinning I always want to ask people about supremacy about the plantation and all that at what moment do we stop being a plantation can you point them to me thank you thank you for the amazing lecture every time I read your text or listen to your lectures I feel that I get a lot of learnings and challenging questions so thank you for that I like very much the way you describe architecture in your lecture as an infrastructure that help us to understand the world or without a question to experiment or as you said in your last statement to propose rebelliousness to think of other worlds like this idea of infrastructure to do all that but when I try to to move that into how can I say to land it into practice to me there's one question that's on the table and it's the idea of urgency so and many of the context you showed us are crossed by urgent matters earthquakes, health and ecological crisis issues, whatever but there's a big tension when we go on urgency because urgency is also a device that is being used many times to frame the debate on urgent supposed to be urgent topics, urgent matters for example and there's many decisions that are taken in the name of the commons for the good of or because of urgent context whatever so how do you deal with this idea of urgency while maybe we need also a little bit of slowdown and also I can critique with this progress ways of understanding time chronological linear time progress and blah blah blah all these things maybe we need to slowdown or maybe it's a matter of not believing in what counts as urgent or amplifying what counts as urgent because sometimes urgency is used as far as I understand to hide other agencies right so we deal with urgency in a context where sometimes it is being used to frame the outcomes talking about the climate emergency means like the first world is having to deal with it because there has been always a climate emergency for everybody else but do you think that in this idea of slowing down to take the time to debate to incorporate different voices to learn from other ontologies from other epistemologies etc etc and maybe to do some other experiments and there I go to the title of your lecture we are not a test lab but maybe this idea of experiment like for example in your article when you were explaining Bad Bunny's context in these strikes I think that those strikes could also be understood as a little experiment of balancing together or questioning together so we are not a test lab but this experimental dimension is also important not to think these worlds in common in other ways I think I like a lot your comment about like going urgency related to time too because I feel like we can speak about that in many different topics but a lot of them also that we as you mentioned become urgent maybe the danger of turning something into something urgent makes it a little bit more superficial that it is because I feel it's when we speak of important debates that take place sometimes suddenly they become urgent but we don't see that they have been here a long time in history because maybe the people who were talking about it were not looked at or like had space to to voice it and so I think that and I'm thinking of course like Naomi Klein speak a lot about you know the speed of capitalism and all this versus the speed of the people but what's interesting in her comment I feel is like the fact that capitalism or when you want to commodify something that could be a message and I think we saw that a lot post 2019, post 2020 when also when regarding all the protests that were happening in the street suddenly the institution wanted to some institutions wanted to commodify it and it became something that was suddenly urgent but then the urgency of applying their method to it meant that suddenly it became just like slogan everything kind of you know simplified then the people who were in the space to to voice it were not the people that were already voicing it for years right, for history so I think when we think of urgency versus time and versus linear time we also have to address that we have to look make the exercise I think to looking at a bigger timeline and understanding really that a lot of struggle have been struggles for many years right and like so I think as you were saying like if it's versus for me like thinking of slowness versus urgency would be again like who can carry the message, who has the voices and what have the method and also knowing that the danger is like you don't want to be superficial or to commodify the answer because I think like international agencies or you know the government or you know the people that have to respond like the organizations that need to respond to people's needs they are slow you know they create bureaucratic systems that make everything impossibly slow but then in a capital society you're not allowed to be slow right because if you're not producing and I was using this example Haiti went from being the richest colony to being the poorest country as soon as they lost as soon as they emancipated themselves from Napoleon and the French they lost what gave them value in a capitalist system right that was the free labor and the land to produce sugar right it was the biggest sugar producer so in that context I'm always arguing for like slowness I mean not me personally because I live in fast forward as an argument as a theory as a way of living slowness is anti-capitalist but also you're not allowed to be slow because you die if you're slow in a capitalist society you don't have an infrastructure provided in place so what I wanted to bring to the question again it's a relationship of power who is allowed to determine the time of something and as long as we are kept away from that conversation we're messed up because we're not controlling our time time is money it's a kind of capitalist society philosophy in a way and in that way you cannot even control I want to be slow I want to live life I think COVID revealed that to many people in the way that I'd rather do nothing than spend my life working for like whatever minimum wage $3.50 an hour is your time really worth that is the urgency now urgent because it affects you while we've been suffering this for 500 years right and in that way on the other hand there's things that are we're running out of time for many things too every time it's like again you know like Palestina is getting bombed and people getting killed and you know Puerto Rico is getting privatized you know every day right it is violence is fast and it's also slow so like how do we play you know with that and acknowledge that sort of system and knowing that I love you know when Cusican can talk about time because you know their time is not after Columbus so it's not like modern time if you look at their time it's much longer history but at the same time you know our urgency is like you know when Mare Keny presented as like 8 of our classmates have died of cancer it's like you need to take really quick measures you need to take uranium out of there I mean you shouldn't have put it there in the first place but it's real like people are dying right so I feel like I would demand for people to be left alone to be slow but from the institutions and the empire to dissolve quick move our way as fast as you can like we don't have the time to wait for you to finish whatever you're doing that is probably killing all of us and I don't know yeah we need faster actions but the action of them is not solving the problem because they are the problem so if they are not getting out of the way then you see what I mean like because it's like I don't want another panel of European experts to tell us how are we going to save the Caribbean or the Amazon you see what I mean we don't need that but we need them to get out of the way quick and repair and return right because it's almost like you don't know how to manage yourself where you leave a system of precarity and depth how the hell am I going to go burn myself with this you know it's impossible like so there's no mechanisms of emancipation in place anywhere everything is always like how can the colonial project and the plantation transform as you mentioned and change form basically you become something that is not readable in the same way but that operates exactly in the same way through the financial financial ways and the social ways and the political ways maybe quickly before we jump over to the audience so they can ask some questions I think that the 2019 Puerto Rico protest the governor were also key in sort of showcasing this tension between something that is very urgent when you look at it in media it seemed very urgent people just went out the streets and started doing all these sort of creative practices of protesting but really they were products of probably decades long activism and groups that were doing work way before that and a lot of the trajectories and organizations that led to the groups who organized the protest stemmed from the Michelin the folks who organized after the 2017 and many people are in prison still today and not only them even the generations prior all the people that died end up in prison right because you're basically challenging the biggest empire military empire you've ever seen the world has ever seen so yes it's not a moment in time but I will say it's like it spans 500 years right even if you don't know about even if you don't know about the people struggling to emancipate you it's still taking place and I feel like again like the narrative how history is narrated and I'm sure many of you can identify with this because of all the places where we come from I think it's a really international audience where you know empire has a really large footprint right and it's something that we need to like think about as you say like there are struggles in our particular case in Puerto Rico you know to decades but also you can date even longer right because it keeps building Capetillo being so important right or even Sostre when it comes to that and since New York is also so Puerto Rican there is also this sort of beautiful trajectory of the lectores from the tobacco factories coming here in New York in the factories and what not doing the Capetillo used to run when she came here to organize and this like New York history she used to run an apartment where she would rent rooms to the workers but also she had a vegetarian restaurant that would serve meals I love when I enter people were eating here I was like that's the perfect setting right Capetillo used to make she had a restaurant that apparently was delicious because some chronic some history documents say that of all workers said it was delicious food but she would serve them food even if they didn't have any money right in the spirit of mutual aid in the spirit of sharing and solidarity that was not it was not based on the like the place where they come from or anything but rather like in their struggle to be emancipated as workers all right so maybe we go over to the audience hello thank you for the lecture I'll just jump straight my question my question is how does treating historically significant architecture as a form of ideology and exploring utopian heroic and critical projects contribute to like a broader understanding of urban critique and how does it escalate the aspirations and potential impact of post-colonial imaginary in a world that is you know like marked by abrupt interruptions of solidarity networks I have a great question in previous lectures like not telling me we always have this quote that is by Delius actually that says since each of us was several we were already quite a crowd and I like that not of us as two people and now three but us that when you understand that history that is being hidden from you you understand that you're not alone in the struggle right and when we think about emancipatory struggles you know like feminist struggles trans struggles queer struggles like anti-racist struggles anti-colonial struggles that's why they don't want that's why they're getting banned in schools because they teach you how powerful you are in history then you may feel emancipated right and say that I demand for better right so that's why you understand how this infiltrates politics because politicians understand it quite well and this is policy I was discussing with a friend actually with one of your professors with Justin Garrett Moore the other day there's think tanks in the US that work on policymaking like decades ahead of time like where they've been thinking when is the ideal moment to ban these books right so when the moment is ripe when we have the right politicians we're gonna ban them because that's the history that they're trying to take away from this dream of a bunch of dudes in Florence or you know some dream of racial superiority but also that they're utopian dreams of collective emancipation and a post-colonial world then you may know that you're not alone that we need to have a like planetary solidarity that is really important to know what is happening in Palestine that is really important to know what is happening in Bolivia that is really important to know what is happening in India and in China and everywhere right and I feel like that form of understanding and for us the research on what form those things take what is the propaganda being produced right like what is the paraphernalia that is being shared and how can we reclaim that in a way when you feel like you're alone you know early in your career you realize that you're not alone because a bunch of people have been doing this and are doing this and connect the dots and I think like on one hand that's the importance of theory theory on one hand gives us vocabulary to address really important things that's why critical race theory is being banned because that's the power of theory and in the other one is the importance not of history since history doesn't exist and something I repeated a lot in Laudre there is that time is a colonial construct time as we know it to understand that there are many things that are connected right and in order to understand that we need to know about them and we need to learn how to look for them and sometimes we're going to find them in books but sometimes books are also going to be lying to us when we wrote the letter to our daughter we say we wrote to her that her name we gave her her name so she can use it as a map to trace her ancestral origins because maybe the university is going to lie to her and for sure the museum is going to lie to her right so the institutions that are here to bring us the truth are not right you go to the university if you want to learn about black studies or everything that is not white you have to go to gender studies or afro but everything else is assumed to be universal but it's not right it's a very European white male straight cis you know form of knowledge what is being given to you so probably you're not going to find those struggles of emancipation and the connection between those things there unless you have like particular people you can go to a new department that was formed that is not funded by the central thing right because it's not doing that so how can we how can we map those cartographies non-colonial, anti-colonial cartographies and how can we use them I feel like I see them as tools also we see them as tools we're looking at history and understanding you know what workers were fighting or you know how we can learn from Marcia Jonsson and Silvia Rivera right because everything there's a whitewash in history it's Pride Month and all the brands even brands that will actually you know fund politicians that are trying to kill trans people would like put a rainbow flag and that's a history they want to tell you it's not the history of the activism that you need to know the history of anti-colonial struggles and all the people within those struggles that are even more oppressed than others that are getting crushed by the military forces I feel like there's a lot of history that we need to be aware of so we need to do our homework and once we start doing that then we realize that we're not alone and that's why the importance a collage for us is a super political tool because it's literally taking all these historical baggage and just throwing it there visible so you don't forget every single thing in that image in those images in those collages are things that we are looking at and there's a little poster of a farmer's struggle somewhere or a little book in the table that is a book about emancipatory pedagogies and yeah I don't know if I'm answering the question in the totality but that's why we can expect emancipatory education and we are at the center of that as we participate as political agents of change collectively for planetary questions that need really urgent answers that we don't have all the time in the world to address sorry, Natalie's hidden there somewhere in case you didn't see her and my is climbing he's in the climbing hour we can start here but I think otherwise there's someone else in the background okay, but we can start here and then maybe no, just see your question why to make it political why not to make something for all the people to come together for good cause versus going to a Palestinian issue that's existing for many years and there are two sides for the story sorry, I don't understand the question is why not why bring the politics to architecture there are conflicts that have two sides just like the Palestinian issue that exists for many years so why why make architecture involve in politics architecture is always involved in politics architecture is political by default and I'm gonna use the Caribbean as an example what is the first thing that people do when they go and make and colonize the Caribbean make planning laws so you can divide the thing in a plantation build some buildings administer the ground architecture is by default by its very definition a political act you're deciding as power I'm gonna build here and you decide what you do with the people or with the landscapes that are there I would say that there are many sides to many different stories but there's also stories of occupation where some people are disenfranchised abused by military powers I showed the example of Vieques but also we can look at Palestina Ilja Weisman writes about it this is not necessarily a mystery and it's not like I have a problem with the there's two sides of the argument because usually two sides mean that there's one that has more military power and there's one that has less but I had to listen to the one who's so militarily speaking it's the same as they say to us you have to listen what the US military has to say about Vieques should I or should I worry a lot about what Spain did in Puerto Rico for 400 years I'm sure they had a reason to do that probably their food was bad and they needed spices to cook so you can get some spices there you can get sugar to smoke everything that is pleasurable but that doesn't mean that the voices that we haven't heard of the people that are being oppressed are really urgent and important and I feel like when it comes to relationships of power and again saying that architecture is not political is a political act we're deciding to overlook all the zoning policies all the economic policies all the military occupation that needs to take place in the whole continent of the Americas without military there's no architecture because nobody's going to enter in somebody's land and say I'm going to build this city here that looks like Spain or like Portugal or like France or like Denmark and you're going to agree to it and you're going to build it for me also and then you're going to be my property and your children are going to be my property and whenever you're not my property anymore you're going to owe me money that's pretty much our history here right so we can listen to both sides but the other side I've been listening to it in every single history book until now you see that's why that thing about the both sides if one of them has a big military maybe I already listened to that story and I feel like we, it doesn't matter where we come from especially if we come from those places we need to do the effort and we need to be uncomfortable because it's not easy it's not easy to be in the position like man, maybe I'm part of the problem maybe we should figure out different ways to deal with this maybe I should understand what are the oppressed of the world struggling with because it affects everybody this is uncontainable for so long it always feels in violence it always feels in genocide it always feels in ecocide so I feel like I'm just more launching an invitation where we where we try to understand the subaltern and again there's a whole body of knowledge this university hires some really good thinkers from the subaltern world because they have money they're connected to the plantations but still some universities have no money and don't have the faculty I have to say but in that regard I'm unapologetically begging people to please try to position yourself on the oppressed the people that have their guns don't need help they don't need that much scholarship my dream of a university is that there's a white studies department in the same way that there's Southeast Asian studies black studies, gender studies white studies to study what are the implications of white supremacy of settler colonialism and all the things that are embedded you know heteropaterarchy and how can we dismantle it right so in that way I wouldn't ask there's both sides to that of course there's both sides to that but I think you know it's just like a whole body of scholarship on the two sides question which happens also in the US right like there's a side also on the side of the police or the side of the military they have the guns I just want to have the books that emancipate me thank you very much for spreading awareness in regards to the postcolonial situation within the framework of necropolitics I wanted to say public defecation as you mentioned our tools of kinesism and the challenge idealist arrogance in the public space for instance the globe javelin telescopic towers and other works you've mentioned are forms of surreal defensive and invasive architecture similar to the continuous monument drawing by super studio but currently projects such as neom are testing grounds for sci-fi and avongar architecture but one entitled landscape without qualities is also your manifesto that reveals the dullness of vulgar shapes and pristine landscapes but I wanted to maybe pose something can you say something about the direction our world is taking in regards to the built environment by way of materializing these pseudo futuristic shapes in the landscape and their impacts in the boundary of Baki and other uprising and all the continuous 50-60 year history of our world how would you say that they would create these as well do you mean the architectures like being built for instance the architecture of neom and mega projects and these large interventions of sovereign states neom is the continuous monument it is exactly the continuous monument so I'm going to be careful with that because what I feel is like neom gets a lot of bashing because it's not in Europe or the US you see what I mean like and that's why we want to do the book on the colonial footprint of architecture right when I look at the colonial footprint of a country like the US or let's say France the devastation of the social at a colossal scale like who is the biggest polluter in the world the single largest polluter somebody knows the answer to this the US army who's the largest client of the BP or whatever they're called now they change the name whatever they morph into another monster the Kraken who's the largest client of BP the US military who is the largest emitter of two emissions the US military so going to architecture and mega monuments neom may be problematic still nowhere close to the US military so I think there's a lot of hypocrisy in the media when they focus on a project usually the shady the archangels I won't defend it just by looking at the list of people they invite it's pretty awful, you can tell but the alarming the urgency that media puts into addressing neom is a bit ridiculous compared to the footprint of the US military for example so why are we not talking about the US military but we're talking about neom and the same we can do with the three gorgeous dam oh my god Chinese are building a huge railway system and they're displacing people there's some negatives to that but also you can look at the footprint of what is coming with it in the center of public transportation or water for communities or whatever versus the US military that only brings chaos and destruction so when we measure the colonial footprints of places and their institutions those things cannot be overlooked and the fact that we don't have a way to measure that it makes it really difficult to assess the real implications of things because then we may get lost discussing a project that is big and maybe problematic probably ecologically problematic I'm sure there's politics there that are messed up and not denying that but for us to spend all the attention looking at basically an ego project like many others and ignoring the biggest polluter in the world that happens to be the US military I feel we're not doing our homework and that's architecture because the biggest contractor the biggest contracts in the US are through the US Department of Defense last year I read about the whole infrastructure of the border the building ecologies that are being displaced and the global scale now architecture like super studio maybe architectural wise because it doesn't have the aesthetics that register to us we don't pay attention to them still architecture still destruction still the footprint is humongous now I would say maybe neon shouldn't be built but if I make a list of things that are urgent it wouldn't make the top 20 I can assure you that I feel like that's why we have to talk about politics and not separate them because it gives us the illusion that if any of you know when he published non-referential architecture or looking at buildings in their details and their corners do you need 40 publications about that corner do you need all the grants and fellowships to go to the people researching the corner probably not if we say that we have really urgent issues that we need to address we need to think about them and we need to name them about why they are there's literally destruction and occupation taking place I always say the wrong order is the I international panel for climate change IPCC I always say ICPP for whatever reason maybe it sounds funnier after the six report I've been doing 30 years finally they address colonialism that's the cost of climate change if we're not addressing those things and maybe Neum when we go in the intersection of colonialism and Neum that's when it gets interesting not so much about the ego project but about the land being occupied about the ecologies being destroyed but again it's not alone it's not the only one there's an endless list that starts with the US military if some of you have fallen to that but so we are in France there's a lot of I don't know sorry I don't know you go there with papa okay sorry I'll be back we'll try again so I don't know if some of you followed what was happening in France but a young guy called Nael he was 17 years old and he got shot by a police officer during a control because he got many different things he got scared the police scared him and they just shot him following this there's a lot of protests happening in France so they are burning also like cars also like burning buildings and things like this so of course this is a direct protest to the assassination of Nael and we are standing for that because there's no reason for police violence ever but also it's a very architectural response to as we were saying many years of of oppression disenfranchement lack of investment in the French banlieue so the banlieue is the project that we have in France like of money that has been put all this is a problem that we know it's very architectural because if you go to the banlieues in France you will see so they were built in the 60s at the time post-war also when France wanted to build more like a lot of people too that were also from the old France colonies didn't really provide any good infrastructure to link the banlieue to the cities push the banlieue far away from cities then didn't invest money anymore in them so the lack of infrastructure services, schools they are just really like separated from for example if you look at Paris from the center of Paris they are falling into pieces there's no money put into parks areas for people to live correctly there so what's happening now is also like a bigger protest against the fact that France is divided because again there was like a lack of of money and involvement to solve how people live and how we created places where people cannot live in a dignified way and also the fact that France needs to address the colonial past and that's something that is really really problematic in France there's a lack of discourse about that too and it's almost like if Mium was a big social housing project that he was going to have all the luxuries for people but it's never that way and I think that's what the problem is more than it's like the radio or it's like is that architecture is mostly a tool for consolidating power and wealth right we can see it in New York you know here is like very evident and real go to Hudson Yarks like two weeks ago we learned Hudson Yarks is funded through an exception of visa that connected them to Harlem and it shows you how like disgusting this system of capitalism is in a way so the question of the artifacts and at the end it's about the program and what is serving not particularly worse but terrible in that way is there maybe one more quick question so throughout the work we see the use of pure forms and geometries architecture or non-architectural work and pure forms are closely related to western civilization but platonic ideals and platonic forms and so on and so forth I would say how do you reconcile that if there's a perfect sphere is there like a perfect image of a man a perfect race, perfect civilization good question can I jump into this too because I wanted to make another question that is very linked to this so can we connect this question with the idea of fetish because do both fetish their marks one or the other one exactly so in its in all of its sets it was going to say double but there's more than two senses like understanding this idea of using these images as icons, fetishes in your collages understanding them of course as images the idea of a fetish is something that hides all those socio-ecological and economical processes of course that's where you think that you are doing that but I perceive and this is an intuition that your use of these pure forms are also working with representations that do not represent something literally so it's kind of there are empty representations in the good way of emptiness meaning that at least this is what they do to me they make me a representation that do not have a reference that reference can be imagined so it allows me to imagine other worlds so it insectivates my curiosity using your last quote it makes me try to think of those other possible worlds so what about that and I'll go with Emma but also what was really interesting for us when we were dealing with the idea of these shapes so it's very complex and I would say a very problematic word but the idea of universalism because of course there's like the universalism that is imposed that just wants also to flatten everyone's history, everyone's identity but what we were curious about and it would be universalism more driven through language and for possibility of that, of reappropriation communicating as a collective or as a community so it's something that we explored more through art because also we always try to divide a little bit our art practice from our architecture practice because we always feel that architecture should always be very responsible we have a responsibility and we talked about that there's a lot you can define architecture you can take a full day to try to define what architecture is it can be many things but it has repercussion on others than us for us art is a little bit more freeing in a way that you are free to take what you see or what you experience in art as you want of course there are different types of art there are some that can be more intrusive than others but we were just interested in that so in our art practice what can we do to try to find something of the common that we can all exchange with and that's why the thinking of language for us forms and pure shapes are a form of language form of poetry we write poetry with shapes so it was a way also to try to to create this space for the common but also going back I think connecting both something that we've been like we've published pure hardcore icons I don't know if you've seen it but it's kind of trying to understand how power uses form like historically in Egypt in the Kingdom of Kush they understood the power of form but also people understand the power of form today there's a real political program in form making especially pure form but also as a form of language as Natalie mentioned we're really interested in also how like the revolution has formed too we know what the black flags are in a certain given context I'm wearing this spiral here not as a coincidence right but the spiral as a form but we made the diagram of the spiral against the circle the spiral allowing for growth also being a way of thinking about time that is non-linear I feel like there's forms are again like empty of meaning depending on the context of people project their meaning there but also they are very human I feel we are form makers and I was again interested in the subaltern or the press or the majority of the world whatever you want to call it I'm reconsidering even the third world concept because Jason Fitzroy Jeffers he talked about like how the third world is not the third in the sense of scale or importance not aligned in the two battles between the empire so in a way even the third world form or third form in the way that I hate being called informal we know what informal means informal means informal settlement means that you haven't been able to read the form of that or you haven't allowed me to make the forms that I want so in a way it's like a claiming over the form so it's not only empire and the powerful that have control over it look at it as a form of language that is human that we always make that and the more you research the more you find people have been doing this since forever something that unifies us so in a way also when we made those collages the early ones about the pure hardcore icons the mystified the icons I remember even lecturing in China and somebody asking in the stage oh that's a western thing so you're telling me that pyramids are western you've been lied to by your history class or spheres are like a construction of Plato like of course not so how can we educate us with that understand that we are form makers and that we are powerful enough as peoples to control the forms we give to everything so I will look at it like that and that has become more evident with the years at the beginning we didn't know necessarily what we were doing it it's like a drone to it and research it because you see that it's prevalent everywhere and then you read Carl Jung and then you read all the people and they give you certain readings into it but then you realize that it's not even for them to answer it has been even our own ancestral and future is forms of knowledge so in a way also it's something about against the new the idea of the new because we were saying that the shapes could be universal forms they are found out through history, through different many also different to users, people in art in construction, in clothing in artifacts it's also something because the new the idea of the new and the new in many things the new also in architecture is something that is very colonial when you think about it because it's the idea that what was before doesn't count, we need something new and the idea also that we can create new is also like a fiction because nothing is new there was always traces or something we assemble we use it so it's something different we occupy and erase the histories that were there so that's also part of that it's like injecting history but also understanding the role and its potentiality as Uriel was mentioning there are forms of hope and revolution also and emancipation but also there's forms of occupation and they may be the same form which is also what it gets interesting so we are unfortunately at a time but thank you so much to Uriel, Natalie Cruz and Jayce