 Good evening everyone and welcome to our open house lecture. We're thrilled you're joining us and just as thrilled to have the pleasure of hearing GSAP faculty, Mabel Wilson, the Nancy and George Rott Professor of Architecture Planning and Preservation and Professor in African-American and African-Jest Forest Studies at Columbia as well as the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. She is here to share her work with us. Before we start, and as we close this spring lecture series with a bang, I would like us to take a moment and acknowledge that while we are dispersed virtually today, we gather in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations. And in acknowledging our role as an institution, a city and a nation in the exclusions and erasures of many indigenous peoples and their histories. To say that Mabel Wilson is one of the most influential, powerful and inspiring figures in our field is no overstatement. In just the last few months, Wilson's work has been recognized by every major architecture and design publication as well as the leading mainstream media in the US from metropolis to architecture record and from the New York Times to the LA Times and NPR among many others. And as she co-curated and opened one of the most important architecture and designs chosen in the history of the Museum of Modern Art, reconstructions, architecture and blackness in America, reconstructions is not only a powerful show that is a reckoning with our disciplines, racist, anti-black and exclusionary foundations, but also, and just as importantly, a beautiful show about all the future possibilities to alter this past. This show alters the Museum's archive and permanent collection in which the work will be included and stands as part of a more inclusive foundation for the future. This summer, Wilson saw the inauguration of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a project she collaborated on with the architecture firm, Haller-Yoon to honor the thousands of enslaved people whose life and labor laid the foundations for the University of Virginia and whose memory was repeatedly and movingly honored this summer in solidarity with the movement for Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter protests, which swept through the nation then and continued to powerfully reshape it today. Also this summer, the already seminal book, Race and Modern Architecture, A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, co-edited with and including contributions from Irene Chang and Charles Davis, among many other incisive contributions from leading scholars and practitioners in the field. The book sold out just three weeks into the hardcover first printing, an incredible feat and an extraordinary accolade for the publication as well as a marker of its already transformative status of artists for our disciplines. But to do the quote, what of Mabel Wilson's achievements and the ways in which they are almost single-handedly recasting our field is tonight, maybe not as important as pointing to the unique how of Wilson's astonishing trajectory. For Wilson's path is in itself a radical design project for our time, one in which on learning and being undisciplined as she has put forth, essential to the crucial advancements and expansions she has contributed to our field, moving it forward through her constant original and critical lateral movements. Wilson is at once an outstanding scholar, writer and critic, her first book, Negro Building, Black Americans in the World Affairs and Museums published in 2012, was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize for the American Studies Association and the Powerful Public Intellectual. Wilson is a highly sought after curator and collaborator working with but also leading and supporting an expansive network of artists and architects around the world and supporting and mentoring the next generation of exciting scholars and practitioners also from around the world. Some of this happens through her global Africa Lab which she co-directs with Professor Mario Gooden. Other work happens through redefining what advocacy practices might look like for architects today through her co-founding of Who Builds Your Architecture, an advocacy project that advocates the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. Through her transdisciplinary practice studio and Wilson has pioneered new ways to render visible and legible how anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates states of imagination, refusal and desire. Wilson's contributions have been extensively recognized. She is a United States artist, fourth fellow in architecture and design and a recipient of the Arts and Letters Award. Her scholarly essays have appeared in numerous journals and books on art and architecture, Black Studies, Critical Geography, Urbanism and Memory Studies. Her publications include Race and Modern Architecture from The Alignment to Today, Begin with the Past, Building the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Negro Building Black Americans in the World Affairs and Museums, and she is currently developing the manuscript for her third book, Building Race and Nation Slavery and Dispossessions, Influence on American Civic Architecture. Wilson has received research grants and fellowships from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Getty Research Institute, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Graham Foundation and the McDowell Colony amongst other. In 2015-2016, she was the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Arts Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts. Wilson received her PhD in American Studies from New York University. Last but not least, Mabel is an always inspiring educator and mentor, a figure who has become not only a model for the many students here at GSAP, but indeed many students across architectural schools today in the US and beyond. She continues to be an inspiring teacher and mentor for all of us, colleagues, and I know I speak for everyone at the school and for me also personally, as both the Dean and as an architect, when I say to Mabel, thank you for all that you do for pushing us to be the best possible versions of ourselves every day, through modeling for us, inspiring us and demanding of us while we continue to expand the possible today and for the future. Please join me in welcoming Mabel Wilson. Thank you Amal for that generous and gracious introduction and I wanna say thanks to Lala and May for keeping tonight's presentation in working order. Okay, so let me do a screen share. Hopefully this goes smoothly. Great. So hopefully everyone can see and hear me. So good evening. And I just wanna follow up with Amal's statement that I am speaking on the traditional land and unceded territory of the Munsee Lenape and I pay respect to their diaspora and honor the past, current and future presence of the Lenape on their homeland. I am also, I'm a GSAP grad from 1991 and so I also, in many ways, which is what I'm gonna talk about tonight, sort of continue, a lot of what I work on are things that actually began with my graduate education at the school, okay. So this lecture was scheduled a year ago and advanced for Open House as a public lecture and one, we didn't realize would be another virtual Open House. Nor did we know it would take place while our graduate workers are on strike. So I stand in solidarity with the more than 3,000 workers in their demands for a fair contract. And for more information, please go see their website, double hashtag, columbiagradunion.org. So I began Studio Anne in 2007 and I chose the Ampersand as a sign that my practice was both collaborative as in and other people as well as transdisciplinary as in and other disciplines. Studio Anne has navigated between written works, architectural projects, installations, performances and curatorial projects, as Amal mentioned, and in many ways that does make me very undisciplined. But as this early diagram of my practice Studio Anne illustrates critical research finds expression in one form that often leads to a parallel project in another creative modality. And so my talk this evening will explore why I've developed these methods of working in order to situate race and blackness in the built environment. So during my architectural education at both the undergraduate level at the University of Virginia and the graduate level at GSAP, I recognized that in order to draw blackness into architectural discourse and to make visible anti-black racism in the built realm, that I really did need to transgress the boundaries of architecture. And to do this, I turned elsewhere to art, to critical race theory, to black studies, to poetry, to literature. And early on, it was the work of Toni Morrison who provided critical methods and deep theoretical frameworks for my practice. And so in her essay, Black Matters, she wrote the following quote, which I've replaced with the word architecture. So my efforts to manipulate architecture was not to take standard architecture and use vernacular to decorate or to paint over it, but to carve away its accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence so that certain kinds of perceptions were not only available, but were inevitable. Then Toni Morrison's nonfiction works like playing in the dark, whiteness, and the literary imagination, I began to understand that it was important to reckon with the ways that the Western episteme, ways of knowing an ontological framework, that is ways of being of whiteness, has made it provisional, if not impossible for the African, along with the African blackened in the hold of the slave ship to become the Negro, to attain historical consciousness. This is the subject formation that the West imagines as being modern. In this formation, blackness is consigned to the past, to the primitive, to the savage, to the not modern, but is wholly necessary as Morrison's rights to give definition and depth to whiteness. That regulation, that relegation to being on the threshold of modernity, awaiting development is, as many have written, a misreading of what it means to be modern. Like Morrison, the poet, Norbesi Philip, recognizes the trap of the West's discourses. Philip distrusts the language of documents and policies. She's wary of the language of being and of history that cannot in her mind account for the Zong massacre when in 1781, hundreds of enslaved people were tossed overboard to conserve the ship's resources. Once the ship returned to the Metropole, the Zong, the slave traders attempted to collect payment, insurance payment for the lost cargo. Those humans turned into property on accounting ledgers and in the court proceedings. Philip's rights of this violence quote, the language in which those events took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples and I distrust its order, which hides disorder, its logic, hiding the illogic, and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational. In quote, what is modern architecture if not dedicated to order, logic and rationality? But can architecture also be hiding the disorder, illogic and irrationality that is the double bind of modernity? As we see here in this early republic painting of liberty and slavery. The discourse of architecture, its representational tools, its historiography, its dependency within state power and racial capitalism, its aesthetics and technologies are all knotted with this double bind of racialized thinking, representations and practices. In response to this double bind over the last 30 years, I've engaged in a black study, one that allows me to make visible my own history and bring black cultural practices and sensibilities into the making of the built world. This is the ethos of dialogue and collaboration that frames my practice as I've explored recurring themes of home places, remembering, mobility and unbuilding race. And I just wanna add, I'm showing the Carrie Mae Wiens and the Jennings because I'm thinking through both these images and the kind of more scholarly side of the practice I do in studio and. So I'm going to begin with home places. In my last GSAP Studio, Studio Six, taught by then professor Stan Allen, we were asked to unpack the single family American suburban house through techniques of collage. I chose to unpack the latent blackness and invisible forces of anti-black racism in that house. Now growing up in a little white house in coastal New Jersey, this is the house seen here. In fact, my father designed this house. My entree into the world of language and ideas was through a book before we read whose pictures are shown here. And they not only reinforce gender roles, but whose whiteness was also normalized, not by words, but by images. This common edition of the Dick and Jane Primer series reinforced that even before we read words, we decode the world through images and clearly neither words or images are neutral. Now for my Studio Six project, I unpacked Toni Morrison's epigraph to her novel, The Bluest Eye, where she carves away at this type of iconic Dick and Jane Primer. So note how the first paragraph introduces the single family house of the suburb. Here is the house, it's generic colors, it's entry and the family that resides there. And notice how it teaches us reading through forms of identification, types of sociality, what is aesthetically pleasing and various effective responses. It makes learning to read possible. Now the second paragraph, the rules of grammar, its structures have been removed. We can read words, but without the pauses of capitalization and punctuation, and as a consequence, meaning in the second paragraph becomes more elusive. Now in the third paragraph, Morrison carves away even more by removing the space between the words. The string of letters makes the detection of words difficult, if not impossible. And thus reading is difficult, enunciation is difficult. It, this third paragraph evokes the madness and silence latent in the Dick and Jane texts. Now in The Bluest Eye, Morrison tells the story of a black girl, Picola, who lives amidst untold violence and suffering. Picola, however, believes that if she had blue eyes like Sally or Jane, she would be beautiful, hence, happy and safe. And in the story, insanity becomes her refuge. So before the studio, the Levitt town house became the site of operation. A long history of white settler colonialism, which forged whiteness as property as scholar, Sheryl Harris writes, restrictive covenants and bank lending practices ensured that America's post-war federally financed suburbs stayed white and heteronormative. Why did you select Levitt town to live? We were looking for a place to buy a home. We looked at Levitt town and we liked the homes here. We liked the advantages of Levitt town seem to offer in comparison to other cities. And we understood that it was going to be all white. We're very happy to buy a home here. So looking at the plans and sections of the typical Levitt town house, I adapted Morrison's strategy of carving away to misread the spatial logic of the house through its representations. Black artists have a long history of working with found objects. And I turned to the assemblage art of Betty Sarr, whose liberation of Antjamima became a generative figure in what I call the house for a degree. The drawings dissected the rooms to find hidden below the stairs between the walls inside the cabinets around the plumbing under the floors in the basement and inside the attic representations of blackness, a mass, Antjamima, a charm. Through this process that included reading the suburb and the city where I also drew the suburban houses of the South Bronx's Charlotte's Gardens, I discovered a house for a gree-greed, a talisman for domestic rituals, and a container for the everyday practices of black life. For these early explorations of blackness, I also drew on the familiar work of LA-based artist John Outerbridge, who recently passed away in November. Outerbridge, who is my mother's brother, grew up in the Jim Crow South, another White House, though a double shotgun in Greenville. My mother and uncle grew up in a house nearby. But this is the home place that I remember. My mother migrated with my father to New Jersey in the 1950s. And shortly thereafter, my uncle Johnny migrated to Chicago and then Los Angeles as did many of their generation fleeing the oppressive racism of Southern segregation at the turn of the civil rights movement. As they moved, they brought with them a rich culture of making things, of making a way out of no way. And as I have written, quote, home places can travel like people in packages. Any place you collect objects of remembrance, model ships and family photographs, or practice rituals of everyday life, cook fried fish from old recipes or make lye soap, all of these things serve as spiritual entrees back to one's home place, end quote. So my uncle John eventually settled in Los Angeles in the 1960s and joined a cadre of artists that included Betty Sarr, David Hammond's Noah Purefoy and others, who made revolutionary artistic statements from the detritus of the Watts Rebellion of 1965. My uncle John built full scale installations that found beauty in urban blight. With architect and photographer, Peter Token, who's a GSAP grad, he was a classmate, we spent a day in the mid-90s talking with my uncle John about how he not only made art out of everyday life, but also architecture. He was a painter, a photographer and a means blues flautist. He found art in many things including the culinary. And we shared the sweetness of grilled catfish while the soulful strains of John Coltrane drifted through his studio in South Central Los Angeles. A is for artists, doors for vintage VWs. Colors of blue, red and yellow mark hazardous chemicals for the art making inside. Doors with holes, artwork on white walls, window framed by the aesthetics of urban blight. The fragments of rag on one side of the wall, a towel bar on the other side, carry rags for watching, washing dishes. Screws as buttons on in search of the missing mule of 1993. Screws marking an asymmetric rhythm connecting two countertops. The studio space was deep like Sun Ra and it was deep like my uncle Johnny's legacy. Over the long arc of the Great Migration, thousands of black Americans like my parents and my uncle moved to and transformed the places to which they arrived. As my colleague Farah Griffin writes in her poignant exploration of migration narratives who set you flowing, quote, after leaving the South, the next pivotal moment in the migration narrative is the initial confrontation with the urban landscape, usually experienced as a change in time, space and technology, as well as a different concept of race relation results in a profound change in the ways in which mechanisms of power work in the city, end quote. So in 1995, I began a partnership, KWA, with an undergraduate classmate, Paul Karyuk, who is also a GSAP grad. One of our early projects was to explore these familial histories of migration. We were interested in how migration as a force does not alter urban space in immediately apparent ways. Instead, these transformations occur over time and begin within the confines of domestic spaces. And we wanted to chart how these communities appear and disappear and thus fail to be registered as urban traces. The away station, a full-scale installation, examines architectural spaces of urban migration. Paul and I imagined a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room and a bathroom seen here on the left, typically separated. But for those in migrations, these domestic routines often occur in the same space. An improvised domesticity emerges in the away station that cuts through this density into 15 towers. Drawing on the techniques of assemblage art, the away station collapses these spaces into a dense amalgamum of objects brought in transition. Furniture, clothing, sentimental objects are packed with newly acquired objects of consumer culture. And that is Paul in the white while we were fabricating the away station. And we worked with a really talented architect, Yusuke Buchi, who's a professor at the University of Tokyo today. For some of these way stations, a hotel room, the residence of a friend or family member, perhaps even a refugee center. It's a point of transition before a point of return to their home, before a return to their homeland or a point of transition along a path of adaptation. Things and memories packed together into a dense milieu in which the rituals of everyday life unfold. The away station's 15 towers could be unpacked according to the space that they inhabit and can adapt like the migrant to the unpredictable circumstances of sight. So just here at storefront for art and architecture where they were first displayed. As you walk through the installation, you heard migration narratives. So in New York, two Haitians, Jerry and Jean-Yurique tell different stories of fleeing the wrath of the Duvaliers. Alan, an undocumented Filipino woman, tells of her aspirations. And you hear my father explain why he left the segregated South in search of opportunities for his family of North. For our exhibition in San Francisco, a Colombian woman who migrated from Peru, seeking independence for herself and her family tells her story. And we interviewed an elderly Chinese-American man who left his homeland at age four and arrived to San Francisco in 1915. And for Los Angeles, when we exhibited there, we interviewed my uncle John about his journey westward from North Carolina to Los Angeles. In these interim homes, these waystations, people established domiciles that are situated between the memories of the homelands from which they recently fled and the imaginings and desires of the places they aspire to be. Free memory. How do you build places for remembering, suturing together the past from the archives and sites of slavery which still bear the traces of the physical, epistemic, and ontological violence of enslavement? Toward this task, colleague Saidiya Hartman writes, quote, I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remains dormant, the purchase or claim of their lives on the present without committing further violence in my own act of narration. It is a story predicated on impossibility, listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words and refashioning disfigured lives, an intent on achieving an impossible goal, redressing the violence that produced numbers, ciphers and fragments of discourse which is as close as we come to a biography of the captive and the enslave, end quote. And this is from her essay, Venus and Two Acts. The city can also be carved away to make extent histories like the African burial ground in 18th century slave cemetery which was located outside of what was then Manhattan's defensive walls when the city was a busy port in the transatlantic slave trade in the British colonies. In 1991, when contractors were digging the foundations for a 40 story federal office building in Lower Manhattan, the remains of thousands of enslaved peoples were encountered. Coalitions of community groups and politicians launched a decisive battle to force the federal government to halt the removal of all of the remains which they had determined would render the site a historical and then allow the government to continue construction. The careful archeological review of the remains reveal that rituals of burial still reflected a presence of diverse African cultures in New York City. For instance, the black community of New York City entered many of the bodies with their heads facing east and they placed calorie shells and pins as ritual sacraments that ushered the dead into the next life. So with Paul, KWA were competition finalists to design a memorial at the African burial site. We worked together with landscape architect Walter Hood to imagine the site as a garden whose caretakers, the descendants, and I mean in quote, as we don't know who the descendants are. So the descendants of New York's enslaved community would tend the grounds of native and medicinal plants. Through their care, they would also tend to the memory of their African ancestors. Made of stacked transparent and colored bricks of cast glass and a cordoned steel frame, the spirit catcher formed a bridge between the city and the sacred ground. And it became a threshold between the descendants and the ancestors. Surrounding the site, an enclosure of cordoned steel posts stand as sentinels over the sacred ground. Enslaved Africans were granted permission to bury only after dark. And so they lit fires to illuminate their rituals of burial that took place outside of the city walls. So for the memorial, we wanted to fashion a space that recall these bonfires who illuminations at night would form an ephemeral meeting ground for both the living and the dead. But there are other histories that are invisible and laborious. When it opened in 1826, UVA's 10 pavilions seen here housed faculty and family. Its lawn rooms boarded 125 white male students and the verdant swath of the terrace lawn was crowned by the rotunda, the centerpiece of the ensemble that housed the library. In his plans for the Academical Village, Thomas Jefferson, Siner of the Declaration of Independence, the second governor of Virginia, the third president of the U.S., nearby plantation owner, an owner of 600 enslaved men, women, and children over the course of his life, brought together an exclusive community at UVA in an environment he designed to be conducive, quote, to help to study, to manner, moral, and order, end quote. When I was an architecture student at UVA, what was silent in the official historical narratives about the university's antebellum period from 1817 to 1865 was mentioned of the Academical Village's dependency on an equal number, roughly of 150 enslaved people. And as we see here, an enslaved woman is taking care of a white child at the end of pavilion nine. That history hid in plain sight for 155 years. So in 2016, I joined with architects, Mijian Yun and Eric Haller. Here is Mijian, who is now the dean of Cornell, seen here in the office of Haller and Yun at our first charrette. And we joined together with a conflict mediator, UVA professor, Frank Dukes, seen here on the right in the blue jacket, Charlottesville landscape architect, Ray Blem, to win the commission to design the memorial to enslave laborers at UVA, which opened this past spring. Seen here at Mount Pierre, plantation of James Madison is Frank with Brooklyn-based Etoge Ojitigbe, who joined the team a year later. For over six months in 2016, we engaged multiple communities from within the university and in Charlottesville. And what we heard was that the memorial needed to tell the unvarnished truth in order to have legitimacy, that it needed to bring the community together to both learn and reflect on that difficult history, that it needed to express dualities, not only the pain and suffering, but also the resilience, dignity and humanity of those who were enslaved. And lastly, it needed to be a living memorial, an ongoing memorial to acknowledge that the work of this commemorative landscape remained incomplete. It was important to convey the material presence of Black lives at UVA, as one response to our survey shared, quote, as a Black American, I feel an internal pride of gazing upon every brick, every pillar, every garden at the university and knowing that this path has birthed an undeniably beautiful present. So we must feel beauty, pride and gratitude. Along with collecting aspirations, hearing about desired meanings, experiences and the stories that needed to be told by the memorial, the team also researched Black traditions and spaces of gathering. And as part of our design process, we looked for cultural forms and rituals that could be translated into our design. We explored, for example, ring shots, the low country ecstatic dance, whose performers move in a circle and whose rhythms and movements connect to West African practices. The circular forms ring-shout or the broken shackle became relevant references for us in designing the memorial. Now we sided the memorial in dialogue with the rotunda, which sits at the highest point of the lawn, which Jefferson placed at a ridgeline of a hill upon which the university grounds were built. The careful terracing of the lawn in section allowed Jefferson to create pavilions that were two-story on the lawn side, but three-stories on the garden side, creating a lower-level walkout basement which housed the spaces for the labor of the enslaved. The spaces behind the pavilions, enclosed by the famous serpentine walls, were workyards where the enslaved labored to chop wood, haul water, watch clothing, slaughter animals, and slaughter animals. And Jefferson understood slavery to be abhorrent and thus employed architecture in the architectural section to conceal it. Now the memorial architecture, in contrast, works to reveal, open, and invite, and utilizing the landscape in the section to create an open bowl-like figure, in contrast to the closed sphere of the rotunda. Both are 80 feet in diameter. So the memorial is oriented northward, the direction of freedom, and the path to the left lays out a step for each year enslaved people lived at UVA. The conical intersection creates a series of nested rings fabricated in Virginia mist granite from a nearby quarry. These multiple layers unfold the histories of the enslaved. The center holds a gathering space which is inscribed by an inner ring which holds the timeline of historical events. The next layer of the ring creates a concave surface of remembrance and the outer convex surface creates a canvas for commemorative expression. To develop the layers of history in the memorial, we worked closely with a group of committed historians and whose thoughtful examination of UVA's enslaved community and the history of slavery at the university provided much rich material. To name names, to tell the story of the enslaved community required that we engaged in an archive of work ledgers and personal letters. The numbers and ciphers as Saidiya wrote of the slave owners. And as such, it is an archive of daily life one laced with silences and violence. And seen here, you could see the note extra hands at Christmas. Now historians estimate that 4,000 men, women and children built, labored and lived at UVA from 1817 to 1865. But we know very little about the details of their lives. But all are recognized by memory marks which are arrayed across the inner arc of the memorial. For most of the 3,111 persons to be exact, the archives do not record a first name or a last name. As the spreadsheet on the right shows, we found records for 889 persons. And of those 889 references, we know mostly the first name of 577 community members and for a handful of people like Isabella Givens or Sally Cottrell or Henry Martin, we know a first and last name. For the remaining 311, what we call the unknown unknowns, we used kinship relationships or occupations to remember their lives. Thus, as you walk into the memorial, you become enveloped by this genealogical cloud of names, marks and relationships. The list of names are traditional features of Western memorials. But given our archive, we had to reimagine social relations and re-humanize the experiences of the enslaved. As a result, visitors engage Henry, Isabella Givens, Jack, Jane, Robert and Randall, as families of sisters, grandmothers, uncles and friends as workers who took pride in their work as woodcutters, janitors, laundresses and fiddlers, carved into the granite the 4,000 memory marks, speak back sometimes with tears to their descendants and to us. The community names appear across from a bench with a timeline and a water feature that captures the attention of visitors who learn a very different history of the university. In contrast to the wall of marks and names which rises and inclines outward, a shallow, near level water table shares with visitors the history of enslavement at UVA. The 70 historical entries inscribed into the water table begin with the arrival of the enslaved to Virginia in 1619 and ends with the passing of Isabella Givens in 1890. The timeline covers the arrival of 10 enslaved laborers to clear the land that would become UVA in 1817 and covers a history of transaction, of work and violence. A steady stream of shallow water washes over the entire arc of the timeline, referencing libation rituals and the currents of the rivers that carried people to freedom. Isabella Givens, a teacher and founder of the Friedman School in Charlottesville, which became the Jefferson School, is the only member of the enslaved community from which the archives have yielded a full name, a date of death, a photograph and a brief written record of her experiences. She serves as a witness for her community and this is what she remembers, quote. Can we forget the crack of the whip, cow hide, whipping post, the auction block, the handcuffs, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro trader tearing the young child from its mother's breast as a welp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by these horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not or ever will, end quote. Her remembrance concludes the historical timeline. Artist Etto Ota Tigbe became interested in layering the information we gleaned from conversations, historical sites and archives, such as rare photographs of the enslaved at UVA. He was also interested in the rough hewn two stones from the daughter of Zion, African-American burial ground in Charlottesdale and the vertical quarry marks in stone that would be worked away by skilled masons. We're looking here at a close-up photograph of Isabella Given's eyes. The original image is in the archives of the Boston Public Library because when enslaved by UVA mathematics professor, William Barton Rogers, she was enslaved by William Barton Rogers who had leave for Boston to found MIT. Now, to realize this relief image in granite, the team had to develop a unique process and customize software with our fabricator, Corey Stone in Madison, Wisconsin. And we were using a technique that Etto had developed in his artwork that produces a lenticular image that can appear and disappear depending on where you're standing in relation to that image. And so the intensity of data was translated from a photograph into a virtual model, then a machine toolpath was generated to create a virtual surface that was overlaid onto a digital model of the memorials per surface. And so this shows you that process. All of this took place digitally, working with remote teams that included UVA's office of the architect and our really fantastic contractor for the project, Team Henry. All of this was done before cutting into the stone. Visible to the public on the exterior surface of the memorial, Isabella Givens eyes are symbolic of all those who were enslaved and their descendants who continued to witness the social transformations and upheavals in the fight against anti-black racism. Days after the construction fence at the memorial was removed in June of 2020, UVA's medical schools, white coats for black lives organized a protest. The group took a knee for eight minutes and 49 seconds in remembrance of the murder of George Floyd, a gruesome reminder of the violence and injustices that persist in the wake of slavery. The memorials reflective and inscribed surfaces, its paths and gathering spaces commemorate a community of black men, women and children who lived lives, who worked, played, we've died, escaped, resisted and refused enslavement together. We remember their suffering, their dignity and their freedom. The memorial to enslave laborers at the University of Virginia came into fruition through a collective desire to face the past, to reckon with truths including the horrible cruelties as Givens quote on the timeline described. With Isabella Givens as the witness for and the watcher of her community, the memorial brings together their lives known and unknown to our mobility. For Toni Morrison, it is not technology that is the hallmark of modernity, but migration. With the transatlantic slave trade commencing one of the longest and largest forced migrations in human history whose trails are still followed by the circuits of global trade and mobility. And the photo video project listening there scenes from Ghana with architect photographer Peter Tolkien, we wanted to examine modernism in the African continent. What curator and theorist Oakley and Weezer argues accomplishes modernity in a different manner. One that quote, one that is quote, not founded on an ideology of the universal nor is it based on the recognition and assimilation of an autonomous European modernism or on the continuity of the colonial project, end quote. In our research and exhibition shown here at Studio X New York in 2010 and there's Peter and the green shirt with Felicity Scott, colleague at GSAP and Ike Mokoye and art historian at the University of Delaware. Peter and I decided to take up in Weezer's charge and look closely at African modernism, more specifically the modern architecture of Ghana. From these visits, we wanted to know as an architecture that mixed the global with the local how was tropical modernism an architecture that was able to embody or not the unstable in emerging values of a post-colonial world? What were the stories of modernity to be learned from looking at these works and their contexts? And as outsiders, we asked ourselves rather than look, what if we listened instead? So this great of photographs depict two single family residences for the Ghanaian elites from the early 1960s. The upper two images is a resident for a prominent businessman was built in 1962 by the British architect, Nixon and Boris. The house's owner, Mr. Pepera, took us to meet one of the architect who at the time still practiced in a crop. The bottom are two pictures of the private residents of the Australian architect, Kenneth Scott and his wife on the right, a former Ghanaian diplomat who was then at the time, a judge. These three images are the American Embassy at a Crop a Harry Weiss and Associates of 1956 and is decommissioned and now houses the Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs. It's a unique structure of Pilotees that makes its entire base public and open to visitors and is symbolic of a post war approach to diplomacy, a new internationalism that was undertaken with the recalibration of old empires. However, as we all know, by the mid 1960s, American involvement in places like the Congo at the behest of corporate interest would be responsible for the downfall of these first democratically elected regimes. And in 50 short years, the US's architectural approach as we saw as we traveled around Accra and we saw the new embassy had transformed from communication and dialogue with others into a kind of fortressing of disconnect and control. This last group of images, which were the last grid in the show is a cross-section through time and space of what we saw. Fry drew and associates design, Primpter College in 1955 to educate 450 boys. And this is the image on the left. And we found it still in use as a school reflective of its programmatic resilience. And in the middle is one of the slave dungeons from Elnina Castle, one of the Gold Coast's busy slave ports. And it shows a Ghanaian tourist observing the interior. This is a node in the violent transatlantic slave trade. Unmistakable in their scale, the slave forts are now destinations for groups of tourists, particularly African-American groups who try to return to reconnect to their roots. But as Saidiya Hartman eloquently writes in Lusia Mother, a book that Peter and I read during our travels, it's impossible to return home because time has irrevocably transformed both worlds. And on the right, we see that at every corner, the towns and cities that we visited were peppered with cellular communication networks and brightly colored kiosk vending phone cards. This emerging architecture of the street signifies a new infrastructure whose architecture is that of a global aesthetic that implants itself anywhere and anywhere and in any city with the logics of high modernism and the international style recalibrated to globalization. We listened and we heard many stories of other modernisms of Africa. So in 2012, I co-founded Global Africa Lab, GAL, as we call it, with my GSEP colleague, Mario Gooden, to explore the spatial topologies of the African continent and its diaspora. I'm showing here work from a 2017 summer workshop we did with GSEP students in Harare, Zimbabwe. So in 2017, we were invited by our colleague and former studio ex-Johannesburg director in Po-Metzepa to contribute to her groundbreaking exhibition, African Mobilities. This is not a refugee camp at the architecture museum at the TU in Munich, Germany. For the pedagogical component of the exhibition, asked of all contributors to African Mobilities, we organized a workshop on the themes of our project, Immobility in the Afro-Imaginary. And we gathered together students from across programs at GSEP and from schools around New York City. The New York Exchange workshop ended with a public discussion at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Harlem with the Blackchalk Collective, American Artist, and our GSEP colleague, Justin Moore. Of mobility, in Po-Metzepa observes, quote, freedom remains a scarce and unequally distributed commodity and how the freedom to move is increasingly becoming the principal stratifier in the long deray of modernity, coloniality, and neoliberal capitalism, end quote. And so the exhibition African Mobilities crafted a counter cartography of the predominant discourse of displacement and crisis associated with the mobility of black bodies on the continent and in the diaspora. Gall imagined speculative futures crafted out of the precarity forged by colonial and neoliberal legacies across the globe. And at From New York City, it translated into a two-channel video seen here, Immobility in the Afro-Imaginary. Most northern cities now are engaged in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out. It means Negro removal, that is what it means. And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact. But black peoples have taken into the streets regardless of efforts to curtail mobility. The project Marching On, the Politics of Performance, explores the history's driving forces and legacy of marching and organized forms of performance. Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2017, architect and GSEP colleague, Brian E. Roberts and I created a research project performance and exhibition that explores the crucial role of the community's collective lubens as acts of cultural expression and political resistance. Our collaborators were the youth performance group, the Marching Cobras of New York City, a Harlem-based after-school drumline and dance team that continues the tradition of early parades and draws heavily on the theatrical flair of southern historically black colleges and universities alongside the beats and choreography of hip hop. With the Cobras, we discuss the history of marching, many of whom were unfamiliar with the origins of their art form. They also asked us very difficult questions like what is lynching, for instance? And with us, they shared their stories of why they joined the Cobras with many starting as early as six or seven years old and remaining with the group into their early 20s. The Cobras offered many of them a creative medium that challenged the criminalization of black youth in public space. We shared with them the history of the 1917 silent march against racial violence organized by WEB Du Bois. With references to the... And we also shared with them references to the revered Harlem Hellfighters, a black unit that fought nobly alongside French troops in World War I when racist American troops refused their A. Talented musicians like James Rouse of the Hellfighters brought jazz to Europe. And when they returned to a country who still saw them as less than human, the streets except in the streets of New York City in 1919. We showed the Cobras how and why black people took to the streets to be in public and implicit protest against white supremacy and anti-black racism. We discussed how the marching Cobras paid tribute to the exuberance of drum lines from back in the day and the marching bands of HBCUs like Florida A&M on the right. We collaborated with the Cobras to develop an opening sequence of the performance of tight linear formations that echoed these historical strides and cadences. Rehearsing these traditional steps and drills was very new for them. One in which they delved into the history of these gatherings and its connection to political protest. We designed costumes. You see Bryony here on the left. The drummers were presenting the Hell Fighters and they wore olive shirts and pants that referenced the uniforms of World War I and the dancers in contrast wore all white alluding to the women who walked in the silent parade. Black communities forged a public presence in places like Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park where the longstanding institution, longest standing institution has been at Saturday drum circles which anyone can join in or observe. Rapid gentrification in Harlem has brought noise complaints from new residents particularly about the drum circle. And so marching on called attention to this community history and the importance of performance as a means of claiming public space in this transitioning and contentious site. So we presented Marcus marching on in Marcus Garvey Park in November of 2017 as part of performance 17 an international performance biennial and needless to say we made a lot of noise. So I'm going to share a short clip of the performance. Months after the live performances we opened an exhibition at storefront that presented marching on historical material that provided the basis for the performance. And we hung artist Genica Henselman's portraits of the costume cobras in the park in Marcus Garvey Park to draw out the unique individual characters that comprise the act and celebrate black youth talent and aspirations. For the exhibition's opening the cobras performed to a rousing crowd of over 100 spectators on the Lower East Side's narrow Kinmere Street in front of storefront. The cobras, drummers and dancers performed without a legal permit because there was once again neighborhood resistance to these sounds. But we took to the streets and marked on black and proud. Unbuilding. Three weeks ago the exhibition reconstructions architecture and blackness opened at the Museum of Modern Art. Co-curated with Sean Anderson along with our curatorial assistants Ariel Dion Krosnik and Anna Burkhart. Because reconstructions explores blackness and anti-black racism it's curatorial ethic not only challenges disciplinary practices but also institutional histories. Anti-black racism, we're interested the show explores anti-black racism in how white supremacy shapes the built landscape. As seen here in H-O-L-C redlining maps this is of Queens, New York in the 1930s. And thus the impoverishment produced by that imprint of spatial, architectural and urban inequity by design can be seen in the overlay of a COVID map that studio and produced for the exhibition's field guide. And yet in the midst of the degradation of anti-black racism black people's found in made spaces of beauty, dignity and joy. Joy seen here in this Gordon Parks image. Reconstructions, 11 architects, designers and artists created projects exploring blackness and the legacies of anti-black racism in cities and towns around the U.S. And this map juxtaposes those sites with the all black towns and freedom sometimes known as freedom towns settled after the Civil War. We ask the group to consider scales of the body, the porch, the street, spaces of beauty, knowledge, liberation, grief, desire, violence and sites in 10 cities including New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Syracuse, Oakland, St. Louis became Kenlock, Missouri, Atlanta and Miami. And here's what emerged. It has been really hard in a future in this country. A real challenge because black people in America are not given the space to even just be. And to think about possible futures somehow we have to reimagine ourselves in new places and then find ways to get there. Interrogating America's history with blackness we're interrogating architecture's history with blackness. So here you see several works in the galleries and I encourage everyone who's in New York to really see the show in the center is Lake Gief, this is Frozen Neighborhoods, a dystopic Afrofuturist interpretation of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Here we see Mario Goodens, Spaces of Refusal on the left, his protest machine for Nashville. To the right, hanging is Felicia Davis's responsive textiles that is fabricating networks in the Hill Districts of Pittsburgh. And in the back wall we see Amanda Williams who's teaching at GSAP this semester. Her project is we're not down there, we're over here which is about Kenlock, Missouri. Elsewhere in the gallery you can see things like Seiku Cooks, Weouchia, Rebuilding Syracuse and to the left, Jermaine Barnes's deconstructed spice rack and for his spectrum of blackness in Miami. To hang out of the gallery forming a threshold to the exhibition of the Black Reconstruction's Collective created a powerful 10 by 10 foot manifesting statement that commits as it says, quote, to continuing this work of reconstruction in black America, end quote. The first day of the exhibit, everyone came out, blackness in all of its beauty. So by definition, the studio is a place of study and in that sense, my practice has been dedicated to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called Fugitive Planning and Black Study. After all, study doesn't engage what is known but rather as a speculative practice and engages the unknown and allies with liberation as a spatial practice, a belief my collaborator, Mario Gooden forges in his work. Studio N has been dedicated to making spaces of collaboration, connection and exchange through bonds of kinship, love and mutual support. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mabel, for this incredible, incredible lecture. It was really wonderful to learn more about your personal trajectory and the history of your family and your home and then to kind of see the weaving of this personal story and biography with kind of connections across time and space and geographically, globally, different cities around the US and beyond. And then of course, history, histories of migration, of slavery and of marching and protest today. Just incredible depth and breadth and also sort of, I mean, to use the term expanded practice is really kind of understatement for the extensive mediums and media that you've engaged in your work as a brilliant architect and artist and scholar. So truly inspiring. And as tonight is open house, I guess my first question, which I think as students apply to architecture school is what is the place of the personal in architecture and how to kind of trace that through one's work, given kind of situations where both as students and as architects, we are constantly constrained with the desires or histories and projections of others. And as you reflect in time, which has been amazing these threads kind of for someone starting what you say about the personal in the work. Yeah, I know, thank you for that great question about like what to do with the personal. I mean, I think it was when I started to maybe draw on my personal experiences that I became comfortable in more comfortable in learning design and sort of understand like how the work could be meaningful to me and the kind of spaces that I wanted to make. It was very difficult in my undergraduate education because it was just a very formal and very weirdly alien to me. And I was fortunate that I bailed my fourth year and I went to the AA in London and spent a semester with basically a term there. I probably could have stayed the whole year but came back to UVA and that moment in the AA and that way of teaching allowed for very much. I mean, there were people literally from all over the world from Nigeria and from Greece and Ireland in my unit and it was amazing how the pedagogical approached allowed people to kind of bring their own experiences into the work. And that taught me something that I thought, okay, I have to capture it. And that was part of the reason I came to Columbia anyway because I knew Bernard Choumé, this new dean, had taught at the AA and his friends were there like Zaha Hadid, Nigel Coates. And so I don't know, there was just something about that that said this would be a good place to test that. And also just part of it just came from, as I've described it in the past is basically being a vampire. It's like never seeing your own experiences reflected in the things that you were learning. I think that's maybe less so now with the effort to kind of like decolonize architectural history and to be more expansive and critical about architectural education. But at the time for me, it was really difficult. And so I started to look at art and thought about going into art. I thought about going to planning for a while. Like I was looking for my exit route out of architecture because I could never quite feel at home in my own education. But I'm glad you didn't leave and instead brought everything into the discipline and kind of blowing it up. So in beautiful ways, well, certainly the formal, I mean, the work is beautiful. I loved seeing the first project, the away station, which seems so contemporary still and both in its narrative, but also in its making and its presence. And so, but at the same time, so kind of tying from a personal anchored position, your work is incredibly collaborative. Every project is a collaboration with an artist, an architect, a writer. And even when you're not collaborating, you're always in conversation with Toni Morrison or others. And we are at a moment where collaboration is so central to more and more central to education and students wanna work together in a way that they didn't five years ago. So I always wanted to hear more about that process of co-authorship through all of your projects and what you found as a result of that engagement. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I like Collaborate One, you just learn. I mean, like I feel like by working with others, it's just, you learn so much, and that's the great thing about studio. It's like, you're not studying a lot, you're studying with all these other people and that you're watching someone else's project develop, but you're also learning from them and they're talking to you, which is why so many of my collaborators are my classmates, whether from undergrad or even Columbia for that matter. And so that was a very important part, I think, of just how I developed and then working in practices like Bausman, Gill, Leslie Gill, for example, Karen Bausman, that was also a very collaborative practice where you brought something to the office, but the office gave you back. So I learned even professionally that you can have those experience. Not all of my professionals' experiences were like that, but that one certainly was. So along the way, I'm really kind of learning these various ways in which collaboration can be fruitful, but also thinking about the ways in which, particularly the profession of architecture is very patriarchal, it's very top-down, it privileges both whiteness and maleness in ways and singularity and genius that in a way negates the fact that practice is always collaborative. I mean, you're always, there's so many people that are engaged and I appreciate the kind of film industry because you get those closing credits and you realize, oh my God, all these people went to make whatever. Or so it's sort of recognized and architecture is that way, but somehow the ways in which history records architecture, it always associates it with singular genius. And that's a lot of, I think, what my work, the practice, but also the scholarly work has really tried to challenge in many ways. And I think it's very interesting I was thinking, as I was thinking about the event with the Black Reconstruction Collective and who kind of wanted to undermine, it was so clear, this kind of singular genius authorship, oh, now we are finally at MoMA and kind of sort of undid this by kind of coming together and forming this collective as a project, which I think is kind of was a very powerful thing. Wanted to talk about representation, but I'm sure it will come up in the questions and I wanna make sure there's enough time. So let me, I know the first question from an anonymous attendee. In pulling forth the fragments of history's interview and locating and symbolizing the gaps and absence of evidence, do you feel that your work is coalescing into a new toolbox of cultural techniques that will help architecture and the arts unpack its relation to racism? Yes, that's great. I have to, I need to kind of use that. Do you ever put that in there? Yeah, I think that's a really great summary. Yeah, in some respects, but I always wonder about that Audrey Lord, and I've said this before, like can the master's tool unpack the master's, dismantle the master's house? And I'm kind of still out on that, but I do think making visible and opening out for discussion and even for people to recognize the tools, like that we receive a set of ideas and that those ideas come from somewhere, they're never neutral and they have their own histories and problematics and it's important to do that. And sometimes it's hard. I think, for example, as an undergrad, but even as a master's student, you're supposed to be mastering it, right? As a set of skills, but I still think it's open, it's definitely open for doubt and interrogation. And I have to say, I think that's something that I actually learned from GSEP. I think GSEP did that quite well, certainly my own education. And I think it's amazing to, I mean, it ties to all these different mediums that you're working with and just going to performance, going to video, going almost kind of as in itself, a questioning of the tools that we use as architects. So a question from Emmanuel Oluncua. What are some of the sacrifices that you had to make to extend yourself to meet the work? How do you situate yourself in architecture now? How has your relationship changed since your first, since you first began practicing and theorizing to what you're doing now? Sacrifice, wow, that's a good question, Emmanuel. I mean, I do think that, you know, I don't know if I've made necessarily sacrifices. I feel like I've taken risks, you know, more so than, I don't think I really, yeah. I mean, that's an interesting question about this question, so I'm gonna have to think about that for a while. But I know that I have taken risks. Like my PhD is in American studies, not in architectural history, wasn't because I didn't want to be in architectural history, I just don't think the field was ready to deal with race. And so instead I ended up going to American studies and I was terrified. Because, you know, I had two degrees in architecture and I hated writing and I still hate writing and I find it very intimidating. But to go into a humanities field as an architect was just, you know, it was a huge, huge, huge, huge risk. But, you know, because it was so unfamiliar, I gained so much in that experience. And then, you know, got to study with like amazing people like Robin Kelly and Andrew Ross and Lisa Dugan classmates like Alondra Nelson and DeVarion Baldwin and Jerry Filler. I mean, I just ended up with just this amazing cohort of people, you know, interlocutors that just helped me expand the scope of my thinking. And so, you know, I think there were a lot of risks and there was always that sense of like failure, you know, potential failure. And when you fail, you do learn something. And so that's, you know, I think that's important. Hey, Grisks, we'd like to encourage that certainly. Two questions that are similar on what would you recommend in terms of literature or books that were pivotal to your career or ones that you feel shape, nuance, your political understanding, interrogation of architecture. This is from Azanya Umuja. Ah, important books. It's a range of, I mean, certainly, I think Toni Morrison was really important for me. Playing in the dark was something I went to early on. And, you know, I had classmates, Columbia classmates that actually, my Scott Slarski gave me the bluest eye and he was like, you really need to read this. And I had not read much Morrison. You know, I had another Peter Tolkien gave me Cornell West, for example, you know, I mean, because he had a background from Cal Arts and photography. So he was reading all kinds of great stuff. I would say influential. I find Roslyn Deutsch's work evictions was really important in thinking about the public realm. I would say other important books. Mark Wigley's essay untitled actually in sexuality and space just like architectural just blew my mind. It was a really important text for me to read. So that's another one. Thank you, Mabel. Two kind of other related questions. One from Gabriel Pereira, which is more of a comment and then I'll read the question. Mabel's presentation is very impressive. I'm Gabriel Pereira. I speak of Brazil. I'm a professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Salvador, Bahia, and a member of the Coletiva Terra Preta, Black Earth Collected. And there is great resistance in situating architecture. Brazilian architecture inserted in the racial environment. The idea of Brazilian is anchored in the myth of racial equality. And it seems to me, an issue that makes it even more nebulous. In the case of Brazil to make this discussion emerge due to the different way in which racism operates here. It's a comment, but you can read it to Mabel. I'd appreciate it. And sort of tangentially from Dori Rinalis, as a footwear and textile designer, my heritage tends to emerge in my work in subtle, modern ways. Is there room for that in architecture being that the history of the built environment of my home, the Caribbean, was erased by Eurocentric design? Yeah, no, those are great. I mean, thank you for coming to the virtual. I mean, I like these virtual lectures. I know. Literally people from all over the world can attend. And actually, in terms of Brazil, I've been once to Salvador de Beira and would love to go back. I was just looking at my slides recently because the person that I went with who is a classmate passed away, a GSAP classmate passed away recently. And so I was looking at our trip to Salvador, which is really remarkable. But I found another really important text for me was Denise de Silva-Faheia's global idea of, toward a global idea of race. And she has an amazing, she's a Brazilian scholar, but she has an amazing chapter on kind of like the analytics of race in Brazil. And that really shows you how race becomes operated on a very different language or set of relations than, for example, in the United States. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that the racial, I like to think about the racial as a category that is like capitalism. It is worldwide. It is everywhere. It is in Africa. It is in Asia. It works with colonialism, capitalism, the kind of modern state formations to produce inequalities that are exploitable. I mean, that's the work that race does. And in terms of just expression, I mean, I'd like to think that I'm not looking for like an aesthetic, an African-American aesthetic or, you know, like some of my early writing and we're kind of picked that apart. I think there are sensibilities, but I don't think it's a monolith. And, but I do think there are sensibilities of making that are continuous and that sort of emerge from, you know, the production of a diaspora, for example. But, you know, I'm gonna do a project with a group in South Africa. You know, it's a collective, it's another collective, but we're working with a group in Johannesburg. But part of the project is to understand like what is black, what is black, aren't conversations around blackness, often in the U.S. are very different around conversations of blackness in the context like South Africa. So to really start to explore, explore those meanings is that project. And you've answered the question from Toshukwe Uyan, in a way, while there are similarities between them, the experience of blackness differs across the African diaspora, what are your thoughts on unifying these perspectives into a collective that can bridge these communities and people in a way that's the work you're currently engaged in? Yeah, it's a good, I mean, you could see some of that. The recordings of this group, which is called the Practicing Refusal Collective, which was started by Sadea Hartman and Tina Camp, we have a project called the Sir Joiner Project. And so there's a website, and I think some of the videos of these conversations can be found there. And that's kind of part of a conversation that we're sort of trying to ask. Maybe one last question. Could you please speak about your experience with academia and need for decolonizing pedagogy curriculum in the classroom, from there and from that? Yeah, I mean, I think there are, yeah. I mean, there's so many tiers, I think, to institutions. You know, I've worked, you know, I've been working with MoMA, which has its own institutional structure histories. I did some small work with the Museum of, Natural Museum of American History. I mean, American Museum of Natural History, sorry. And then working with an institution like UVA, and you see how power is structured. You see the histories of these institutions and what does it mean to kind of question those power structures? And it's work and it seeps into everything, from, you know, the classroom to pay to, you know, and there are all sorts of inequalities. And I always like to remind people that you can't think about the racial without addressing patriarchy, without addressing sexual. You know, these regimes of powers are often intersecting, you know, as Kimberly Crenshaw brings up. And so, yeah, you kind of have to have across the board conversation. And the black faculty at GSEP put out a statement on learning whiteness. And, you know, Amal's been very supportive of engaging the faculty and the students in, you know, asking that question. And it's produced, I think, some really interesting outcomes over the course of the year in regards to that. Yes, it's been really important, incredible moment for the school. So, well, thank you, Mabel, for this incredible talk. And we're just, I feel it's amazing lecture that hopefully has allowed you also to put pieces and parts together and feels like a very strong ground from which to build and, you know, can't wait to see what's next in bringing yourself as an artist for all the practitioner architect to continue to contribute in amazing ways. It's been really inspiring and I'm sure our prospective students and faculty, I'm sure, incredibly inspired by your work. So thank you so much for really a wonderful presentation. Yeah, thanks for the invitation and thanks for the support, Amal. Yes, and hopefully we'll be together soon physically. And we can invite our colleagues from Ghana and Brazil to join us in Avery. So thank you, everyone. Bye. Thank you.