Mabel O. Wilson: Spaces of liberation.

Architecture and its foundational myths

0:00Hello. Architecture likes to tell a story about its heroes and the foundational myths which framed them, how it began, who built it, what it was for. Its knowledge is a red-lined site, neat, discreet and observable. But what if it isn't all there is to tell? What if our architectural history itself, the knowledge it describes and the methods used to collate and disseminate it, are themselves subject to biases and distortions, the better to mediate what is known, and about, and by whom? How can architecture as a discipline tell that story? The unknowing, the syncopated or dreamy?

A story of the other, and of the everyday, the better to broaden its relevance. My guest this week is architect, historian and professor at Columbia University, NYC, Mabel O. Wilson, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Mabel's work includes books, exhibitions, memorials and the collective work of the Practical Refusal Collective. We speak about a recent volume of the collective, Thinking from Black, a Lexicon, an unusual reference book and work of literature that brings together artists, scholars, poets, architects and activists.

0:59To build a vibrant, experimental vocabulary for black life, culture and collective imagination. Through its collection of cross-referenced and eclectic entries, presenting, as the blurb has it, words, phrases, concepts and ideas that are part of the many languages constituting and animating black life, the book argues for Thinking from Black as a creative, plural and liberatory practice rather than a fixed identity, one that refuses deficit-based frameworks and makes room for contradiction, tension and possibility.

1:29A is for architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Introducing Mabel O. Wilson

1:37Hello and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted to be talking today to Professor Mabel O. Wilson. Mabel, thank you so much for joining me. I'm going to be talking about a book you contributed to and your practice as an academic, scholar, activist, designer, I guess. But the book we're talking about is Thinking from Black, a Lexicon, the Practicing Refusal Collective, which was edited by a group and it's published by Farah, Strauss, and Giroux or FSG Originals.

2:08And it came out this year. Before we get to discussing your part in that and your part in the Practicing Refusal Collective, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Yes. Well, one, thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure to talk about work, to talk about collaborations, to talk about what's going on in the world. And I'm Mabel Wilson. What pays the bills is I'm a professor at Columbia in architecture, where I am actually split between architectural design.

2:38So I still teach design studios and architectural history theory. And so I work with doctoral students and teach one of the required classes for our Masters of Architecture students, which is a long 19th century history survey, which is absolutely fascinating. And I'm also joint appointed in African-American and African diaspora studies, where I am currently chair of the department, essentially in Black Studies at Columbia. So I'm kind of all over the place. And I just describe myself as being undisciplined.

3:10Not trans-disciplined, not inter-disciplined, undisciplined. I like that. I think that's probably quite honest. Keeps it messy. In a good way. Where did you train in architecture? I actually have two architecture degrees. I have an undergraduate from the University of Virginia. In Charlottesville, hence my Thomas Jefferson obsession. And I have a Master's of Architecture from Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where I teach. So I, yeah, and I have worked professionally, had my own practice. So really, you know, my background is in architecture.

Finding a place in American studies

3:44But I've always had questions about my own, let's say, cultural, even racial experiences as an architect, about the discipline I was learning. I often describe my undergraduate as being a vampire, just never seeing myself reflected in what I was learning. And that kind of led me to a set of critical questions that I wanted to ask by pursuing a doctoral degree. But architectural history wasn't quite ready for those questions. So my doctorate is in American Studies from New York University. What is American Studies?

4:15Ooh. We don't have the equivalent over here, like British Studies. Yes. Well, because even here in the United States, we just learned English as a discipline, right? If you're going to study literature, you study English. And so American Studies was sort of a post-World War II discipline that really emerged kind of in kind of response to exactly those traditions to try to find a body of knowledge, particularly cultural knowledge.

4:47So like, like what, you know, like what is American literature culture? And, you know, some will argue that it linked to the project of soft power post-World War II, CIA, you know, how to actually transport American culture internationally. And that the field of American Studies was to kind of generate a canon about Americanness that could be spread globally.

5:18That's the backstory. But my degree is really kind of a cultural studies background. So coming out of the UK, thinking about people like Stuart Hall, the Keywords guy.

5:32Why am I blanking on his name? Very famous. Thompson. You know, so coming out of the cultural studies movement and in the UK, sort of being translated into to the United States, probably in the 80s, I would say. It's a really interesting comment, this idea of the vampire nature of the architecture that you studied, not seeing yourself reflected in it. Can you talk to that a little bit? How are American studies, how have they been advantageous in you understanding the Black voice, Black experience within architectural practice and design history and so on?

6:12I would say my undergraduate education, for example, you know, the sort of history classes, the influence when I was at the University of Virginia of sort of reexamining classicism and precedent. And so it was literally a kind of post-modern curriculum moving away from modernism, which, you know, initially sort of questioned history in relation to an embrace of progress.

6:43Even though history, even though history, even in modernism, kind of returns by the 40s and 50s, never really leaves, as the post-modernists would argue. And, but nonetheless, you know, I was looking at Noli maps of Rome, learning about different palazzos, the Palazzo Farnese, looking at proportions, you know, reading the works of Slutsky, Eisenman, you know, very, very, you know, steeped architectural history theory at that point.

7:17And even very steeped in, you know, European and American culture, primarily European-driven American culture. And what I wasn't seeing really was any understanding about the kinds of spaces that I would have experienced growing up in. My grandparents lived in a double shotgun, for example. And, but that wasn't a part of, let's say, the history that I was learning, even about American history.

7:47You might get a hint of it in vernacular, but no, it was usually, you know, Richardson in the 19th century, H.H. Richardson in the 19th century, Charles Bullfinch coming out of colonialism, Jefferson having gone to UVA. And so you really didn't get much of a kind of more expansive interpretation of what essentially becomes global architecture, I think, by the global architecture movement by the 2000s. I think it's radically different now. But certainly when I was doing my undergraduate in the 80s, wanting to do a doctorate degree in the mid-90s, there was still some reticence about race and racial discourse, racialization being a part of the discipline and the discourse.

8:33And so American studies said, sure, come study with us. And, and so I ended up doing a degree in American studies instead. I'm interested, obviously, immediately enticed by your grandparents' double shotgun house, which sounds very exotic, but is, in fact, kind of everyday.

Vernacular architecture and social history

8:55I've wanted to ask this question for a long time. I've not had a guest who perhaps can speak to it a bit. Do you see this turn towards, say, for example, trying to understand ethnic minority, ethnic majority, or non-white Western perspectives as a part of the postmodern turn away from the kind of heroic and totemic and canonical? Is there something distinct in this particular form of African American studies, for example, which distinguishes it from that general diversification or perhaps better engagement with the everyday experience of, quote unquote, normal people?

9:37I think that's a really great question. I think that, well, I think there are two things. There's one, there's the discipline discourse of architecture, and then more broadly, you know, like if you start to think about disciplines like history or, or black studies. So, for example, in history, there's the emergence of social history. So, ways in which histories exactly do what you say, move away from the kind of historic figures, the generals, the great men, and ask, well, what's really going on on the ground?

10:08You know, sort of influenced by Marxism, of course, thinking about working class histories. But then you get, you know, gendered histories, women's histories, you know, so social histories really does kind of blow that kind of open to say, well, what are the other ways in which, you know, people are kind of making their lives and literally, you know, the kind of production of historic history in the sense of Marx, perhaps, can be important. I think in architecture, you know, and again, I mean, these are disciplines that are emerging in the West in very specific ways.

10:44Architecture is a Western discipline. It is, you know, I make that very clear to my students. There's building and people build, humans build. Architecture is a specific set of practices that emerge from building that gets codified in particular ways, modes of drawings, treatises, all of that stuff that then really becomes what we call architecture. And the trick, which is what architectural history does, is to then take that umbrella and then spread it all over everything and says, well, now we can look at Egypt as architecture.

11:18Then we can look at Rome in particular ways as architecture. Then we can go to the Phoenicians and look at them as architecture or the Incas as architecture. And oftentimes what that did, when you look at early architectural history tracks, is that they produced social, cultural, racial hierarchies in relationship to the modern architecture and those who are going to lead civilization forward. And that's well documented in things like global architecture. This is why we produced the book Race and Modern Architecture, is to exactly show how from the 18th century onward, the formation of this kind of modern discipline and eventually modern practice of architecture is situated in particular ways.

12:00What a fantastic way of putting it. I think that's amazing. I've actually made the hairs on my arms cut. I'm not being silly. I just think identifying this universalization or, as you say, is spreading it all over everything and then using it as a way to kind of leverage authority, hierarchy. I think it's been both profoundly distressing for those folk that have had it spread on them when they didn't want it in the first place. But it's also been really subversive for the practice of architecture itself, which has lost its sense of identity within that.

12:33It's very difficult to point to something and call it architecture at a certain point if everything becomes subsumed in this. Does that make sense?

12:42Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there was an effort, you know, in the 60s, Rudofsky architecture without architects. Yeah. I mean, I think there were efforts to, in many different, the emergence of vernacular, you know, there's the, you know, the whole organization of people that, you know, sort of study vernacular architectures. And so, you know, I think it just sort of, you know, kind of blew open in ways, particularly in the 60s onward. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's useful.

13:13I always, but this is, you know, I tell the, there's a history to history, like history is not, history is invented as a, again, as a discipline, as a certain way of seeing the world. And people have understandings of what is past, but it can be quite complex. Some cultures see the past simultaneous with the present and the future, right? So, I think it just helps to be conscious of where one is situated, to use Donna Haraway's term. I did a podcast a long time ago with a scholar in Britain called Ola Uduku.

13:47Oh, yes, I know Ola. Oh, do you? I do. He's great. He's wonderful. And she suggested Chinua Achebe's... Things Fall Apart? I think it was Things Fall Apart. It was either that or the other. But it was as a way of trying to understand and the way that he kind of articulates that difference in kind of engagement with time, which was really useful to me. I want to kind of understand your intellectual heritage yourself, I guess. What foundations have you built your kind of scholarship on? You've mentioned Donna Haraway and you've mentioned a number of other scholars. But in terms of particularly this work around this book that's led into your involvement in the book, Thinking from Black.

14:25And I guess I'm asking this because it would be nice to kind of strew ideas and scholars and works that might be instructive to listeners as well who are wanting to understand this line better. I think when I had these kinds of questions, particularly when I was doing my Master's of Architecture at Columbia, I took a great class on postmodernism with Andreas Hoyssen, who was phenomenal.

Reading Toni Morrison in architecture school

14:52You know, and just sort of trying to sort out the beginnings of a theoretical framework and questions that I could use to then sort of try to produce architecture from Black, perhaps, you could say. And my last studio I did with Stan Allen, who's former dean of Princeton, a really great person, thinker, maker. And he asked us to work on the single family house and to use the method of collage to attempt to unpack that.

15:29So to kind of use this avant-garde, surreal methodology. And I became interested in thinking about in what way had the single family house in the United States been kind of receptacle of Blackness and anti-Blackness. And the thing that I turned toward, I mean, and it was a revelatory semester, it was my last semester at Columbia. I ended up looking at Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. So I ended up looking at a novel. And she begins that novel, and I've spoken about this before publicly, with an excerpt from a Dick and Jane reader, you know, like, see Spot Run, see Dick Run, see Jane Run.

16:09And she takes that, and the first paragraph is very straightforward. And then the second paragraph, she takes out all of the rules of capitalization and punctuation. So she kind of removes grammar. And so you see it as a series of words, but then you kind of see, like, okay, there are these hidden rules that are actually structuring meaning. And then the third paragraph, she takes out all of the space between the words. So it's just letters. And so it is completely nonsensical.

16:40It's beyond utterance. You can't speak it. And that, I think, she did so that she could show this is the world that the girl, Pecola, and the Bluest Eye lived. She's learning about the world through Dick and Jane. You know, Sally, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, perfect family, mom and dad, suburban house. And that is not the world that she lives in. The world that she lives in is very different. But what she was learning was not matching up with her own experience. But what that also told me was that perhaps in architectural representation, we could also rework the rules of architecture.

17:17How do we know that a dotted line means a dotted line or a thick line means what it is? And so I was taking the drawings of, let's say, a Levittown house, iconic 1950s suburban house that was mass produced and remarkably segregated. I mean, those neighborhoods were, you know, they were covenants and, you know, violence to keep them white so that the property values stayed what they did, even though they weren't wealthy communities. And then I kind of reread poetically the lines of the house. And so it helped me to go outside of architecture to think about form, representation and meaning to then sort of translate that back into architecture.

17:58And that kind of set off, you know, just a whole set of questions. I was looking at the work of Betty Saar, who's an artist. She is a peer of an artist named John Outerbridge, who is my uncle, was my uncle. So I was looking at my uncle John's work. And he drew a lot from growing up in North Carolina in relation to the houses, you know, that I recall from my childhood. And again, they do assemblage work. So it's not collage work, but it's assemblage work, you know, using found objects, putting them together to create new meaning.

18:36So again, a kind of surrealism. But there's, you know, there's a whole history to black surrealism, as I eventually found out. So already when I had those questions, I was already looking outside the discipline of architecture and art and literature. You know, Toni Morrison's playing in the dark, I still refer to that book, for how to think through representations of whiteness in literature and art and architecture. It's always lovely when people come with foundational and inspirational things that are not in architecture.

19:06I think it's really, I think it's really good for architecture students as well, who, under the cosh of so much professional expectation to, you know, learn BIM and learn all the software and learn all the building regulations and learn all the conservation regulations and be serious. I think getting people to think a little bit more loosely about the discipline still is really great.

The Practical Refusal Collective

19:34Could you talk about the Practicing Refusal Collective? You're part of it, one of the sort of leaders of it, as far as I understand. What's it doing? What's it for? Well, the collective of which I'm a part of was a group formed by Saidiya Hartman and Tina Camp. I think at the time, Tina was at Barnard College, across the street from Columbia, Saidiya's my colleague at Columbia.

20:02And they wanted to just get a group of people together to sort of think with, particularly in light of what was happening with the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests that were happening, the protests that were happening, the death of people like Eric Garner out in Staten Island, protests that were happening around the city. And, you know, to sort of begin to just have conversations about what is Black life at this moment?

20:39And are there ways of refusing the ways in which Black life was being defined as something as less than capable of being eradicated so quickly, policed, incarcerated, devalued? And we sort of started as a group that shared readings, works. We met on a, at least once a semester, so at least two or three times a year.

21:16And it, you know, it just, the conversations just kept going, because I think we found it was helping us shape ways of thinking through our own respective disciplines. And I would just say that I think many in that group have drifted into very diverse ways of working that they would not have otherwise. So, for example, Saidiya has a really amazing piece that's going to be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

21:51Tina is one of the producers, and that, that work was performed in Amsterdam, actually, in the fall of 2025. So, taking some of Saidiya's work, collaborating with producers and her kind of more theoretical conceptual writings, and then turning it into a performance. And so, I think it's been interesting over the arc of the last, I don't know, I think we started 2014, 15, you know, over the last 12 years to see the kind of work that we've produced.

22:25And so, really, the, the lexicon has really come out of those dialogues.

22:31Refusal of what? Refusal to be defined by the kind of discourse that has circulated since racial difference has been born. I mean, it's, you know, race is invented. It indeed is a social construction, but it's very much a lived experience. It emerges as capitalism is taking hold, nationalism, the colonial expansion of Europe globally, and it serves the purpose of producing hierarchies of value.

23:13That's the point. So, that some things sit at the top, whiteness, typically, and other things, blackness, becomes its polar opposite at the bottom. I like to define it as, you know, that, that, that whiteness is a set, it's a power relation, whiteness is power. And it doesn't mean that you're all white people have equal access to whiteness. My poster child for whiteness is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, because I think he's deeply invested in a project of whiteness in this country, even though he understands blackness in poverty, deprivation, poor housing, lack of access to health care.

23:56Like, he grew up impoverished in the deep south, so he understands blackness all too well, and yet, through his own, maybe, I don't know, ideological perspective and desire to have a well-funded motor coach on great vacations, I think he is invested in whiteness, and that's how he rules. And so, I think these power structures are with us, I think part of what we're trying to understand in the lexicon is the ways in which those terms such as blackness are not monolithic, they change in time, they change depending on where, who, and then trying to put together a set of terms, it's not definitive, that show, you know, those varying, those varying contours.

24:45There's 98 entries in the lexicon, and they touch on various themes like solidarity, syncopation, risk, gesture, gravity, and so on. Yours is particularly interesting, unknowing, and I guess when I was sent the pitch by your publishers for this book, I first of all recognised your name through previous reading.

The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA

25:15But I was also quite interested in this particular topic, it deals with your short essay, and it's only a 900 or so words long, your short essay in this lexicon deals with the production of a memorial, the Memorial to Enslaved Labourers at the University of Virginia. Would you be able to speak to the origins of that project? Sure, I mean, as I started, I am a University of Virginia graduate. And so, Mr. Jefferson was very much, you know, a heroic figure for, you know, young students of architecture to sort of emulate.

26:00And, you know, that is not to say that Jefferson is an absolutely brilliant polymath. You know, I mean, incredible thinker, statesman, visionary architect, natural historian. But he was also a slave owner, owned up to 600 slaves over the course of his life. Oh, that's a lot. Yes, had a concubine, Sally Hemmings, with whom he had children.

26:34She was the half-sister of his wife, Martha Wales Jefferson. Yeah, I mean, complicated histories and stories. So his wife was mixed race? No, his wife was white. Her father, John Wales, had Sally Hemmings' mother, Elizabeth Hemmings, as his concubine. Bloody hell. Yeah, complicated and messy. And so when the father dies, Elizabeth Hemmings goes to Martha. Martha marries Thomas. So Elizabeth and her children, including Sally, I think Madison, James, her half-siblings are now her property and live at Monticello.

27:13And then Martha dies. Sally's around, kind of probably lookalike. And, you know, Tom has an affair with what they call, whom they call Dusky Sally. So anyway, complicated histories. But it shows you, you know, the complicated ways. And Sally Hemmings was, at that point, one quarter Black. She was white. But she was enslaved. Their children was one-eighth, or what would be called in racial language quadroons. They were white children, but they were enslaved.

27:43They were their father's property. So it gets very complicated. But anyway, we don't get that story. Hey, UVA. And so I've been working on a longer project for 10 years about the sort of history of that period in architecture. But anyway, as I was starting on my book project, Building Race and Nation, a friend, Mijin Yoon, called and said, hey, there's this competition to do this memorial. Do you want to join us? Because we're up for an interview. So I said, sure. And we got the project to build the memorial to enslaved laborers.

28:17And I think we got it because the university was unsure of what it wanted to do. It had no site, no budget, and just no sense. Is this a landscape project? Is this a memorial? So part of our mandate was to help them figure out what it is that they were going to do, given this history of enslaved people who built the university and then lived at the university, probably over 4,000 people, over the course between 18, probably 1816 and 1865, and the end of the Civil War.

28:54So it was a fascinating process.

28:58You know, we did public dialogues. We had an amazing group of people. The university had already been kind of working on this question with a group of faculty, students, community people, staff, alumni, to sort of get at, well, what was this history of slavery at the university? So it was called the President's Commission to Study Slavery at the University. So they had already done about four years of work, and then we kind of worked with them to develop this memorial that opened to the public in 2020, right in the middle, basically, when COVID started.

29:38Perfect timing. Perfect timing. Yeah. And one of the things in retrospect that I realized that we were dealing with was a difficult archive of slavery, which are things, these are some of the questions that Saidiya's, Hartman's work is great for. Like, what do you do when the evidence isn't there, or the evidence about the person? There's no name. You don't know who it is. And yet, the no-named woman, as she writes in Venus in Two Acts, you know, is setting precedent to abolish slavery in the UK.

30:10And so who are these women who were on these slave ships, for example? Or who were these people who were enslaved at the university who are only referenced by two hands? So what do you do with an archive that doesn't tell you anything about these people? And yet, you are tasked with the problem, again, of form. You have to make a memorial that remembers people's names and dates and places. But the archive doesn't give you that information. And so I'd like to say, on the physical memorial that we made in Charlottesville, we came up with tactics of provisional mark-making.

30:48We worked with a fantastic artist, Eto'o Titibe, because we heard at one of the meetings, well, we needed to see who they look like. And we didn't want to do these generic, bronzed-caste enslaved people. In the memorial, we felt that no, there were other ways to mark the anonymity. And so on the outside is this beautiful image of Isabella Gibbons, who was enslaved cook at Pavilion 6.

31:18It's one of the few photographs we have. And Eto'o's technique is lenticular. So depending on how you look at it, you see it, and then you don't see it. And so she's there, and she's not there. So she's not like the Jefferson statue on the north side of the rotunda at UVA, cast in bronze, 36 years old, holding the Declaration of Independence. She's a much more haunting, ghostly figure. And so the provisional mark-making goes on the interior.

31:50People said, we want names, name names, name dates. We didn't have names. We estimated, the historians could estimate there were probably about 4,000 people. We had about 500 names. Most of them were only first names. Few people like Isabella Gibbons, who were free, who stayed, we knew first names and last names. And then we had things like in diaries that said two hands hired at Christmas. So for the ones that we didn't have full names, we did kinship relations or occupations. So that's how we fill the interior with empty marks, gashes in the granite or memory marks.

32:28Some have names like Bob or John or Isabella Gibbons or Thrimston Hearn. And some say mother, sister, daughter, or friend, or say that they were domestics or bricklayers. And so that, again, is a kind of provisional way of marking the surface of the moment. Because we don't have, you know, the names. It's not the Vietnam Veterans Memorial where there were records kept. It's a very beautiful piece of sculptural work and a sort of piece of land art in a way.

33:04Sort of anti-monolithic at the same time as being monolithic. I like that tension between the feeling that one must memorialize in a dignified and heroic way, people who were dignified and heroic in an ordinary way, without at the same time putting something on a plinth. Which I think is a, you know, it's very, very elegant. I'm interested in this idea of memorialization and its relationship to history. And I think there's an interesting tension in the way that you're talking about it. Obviously, history and memory are kind of two different things.

33:37History, as you've said, is a discipline with a structure and a logic. And what you're doing is something distinct from that. And this is not an accusation. But are you trying to draw into history the ahistorical accounts of these enslaved people? Are you trying to kind of, in a way, grant them the public reverence of historicization?

The archive and the ethics of unknowing

34:03If you know what I mean. Yeah, I think that question of granting historicization is a really great way to think about whether one should do that or not. And it was, you know, this gets back to the question of unknowing.

34:21One of the hard, I mean, it was a challenge. Because, again, we were told by the public, we want names, we want dates. Like, people were really passionate about that. They even looked at us like, this is beautiful and abstract, but we all know what it is. So as we started to think about, all right, how do we deal with what the archive can yield? We thought we could tell on an inner ring a kind of everyday history. And the first document of that everyday history is so violent and so difficult about what people did, what happened when they ran away, the rape of a young girl by some student.

35:02And, I mean, it was just like, I read the document and I was like, let me just put, let me close the document right now. Because, like, how are we going to make this digestible public history, right? But we worked on it and we worked, it was myself, a great, again, a great group of historians, people from the Special Collections, who sort of helped develop that. Some historians on the President's Commission to sort of develop what that timeline would look like. We kind of got in trouble for it a little bit because it wasn't, it didn't mention Thomas Jefferson enough and everything that he did.

35:33We just wanted to tell, yeah, so-and-so was like painting a fence today or this number of people arrived at the university who were enslaved by this professor or were rented by the university to do this work. So, you know, I mean, it's a very mundane, again, as you mentioned earlier, grounded sort of narrative. And it ends actually with the death of Isabella Gibbons. And that concluded the timeline, the liberation in 1865 of the Black community in Charlottesville as the Union troops arrived.

36:05And then the last entry is the death of Isabella Gibbons.

36:09And, you know, that was a very difficult history. But the thing that really stuck with me was, well, I think two points to get back to the question of unknowing. One is we used Isabella Gibbons' recollection, because she tells us what she remembered of slavery in a letter that she writes to the Freedmen's Record, because she becomes a teacher at the Freedmen's School in Charlottesville, because she taught herself how to read and write while enslaved.

36:40And what she remembered was the violence. She says the crack of the whip, the iron collar, the stealing of children from their mothers. She remembered the violence. And the reason she said that was because she could see how white Southerners were trying to turn the history of slavery into a narrative of their benevolence, that they were good to their slaves, and that their former slaves loved them. And Isabella, and this is, she literally, I think, writes this in 1867, like two years after she's liberated, right?

37:14She's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We remember the violence, because the violence is necessary to keep us in bondage. So she just writes this incredible description of that violence. And that's what ends it. So memory is important, because that's what she remembered of slavery, even at the University of Virginia itself, right? Because that's how you keep someone, you have to keep them terrified, because they can run off, they could kill you. Like, there is a lot that can happen.

37:44But there is an extraordinary amount of violence to keep people enslaved, keep thousands of people enslaved, hundreds of thousands of people enslaved in the United States. But that, again, brings up the question of the archive, and how we address the absence of the archive. And so I was approached by Leslie Loco, who curated the Venice Biennale, 2023, Architecture Biennale, to contribute to a section called Mnemonics.

38:21So specifically about memory. And I had been fascinated about the problem of the archive that we had encountered, and what we couldn't know. There's so much we don't know. You know, we don't, the names we don't know, what people were doing, you know, we don't even know where Isabella Gibbons came from. They think they've now discovered she was actually owned by a free black hat maker, and that she may have been bought by Professor Rogers,

38:52as a cook in Pavilion 6. Rogers actually goes on to found MIT. So there you go. So that's how common slaveholding was. But there's so much we don't know. And so, you know, it just got me thinking about, can remaining unknown be a form of liberation, right? Because you then don't have to be scrutinized for the violence that was done to you, for what happened to your life.

39:22And that maybe the anonymity, the unknown, which Saidiya writes about, M. Norbeci Phillips does with her work Zong, Catherine McKittrick writes about this in her book, Dear Science. You know, they all begin to address what happens if the anonymity, the unknowing of something can actually be a form of liberation, so that you don't get the scrutiny of the West, of the archive, of the record that then documents your dehumanization.

40:01Yeah, I think it's a really interesting and important question. And I guess more broadly speaking, in relation to the growing and potent field of decolonization, how does a historian like yourself and a theorist and a practitioner like yourself deal with the archive as a sort of an artifact of modernity in a way? And modernity in very good ways, in the kind of ways of collating and collecting things,

40:32but also with that highly pernicious quality of generating hierarchies through taxonomies that it inevitably does. How do you deal with it? And is there, I guess, a suggestion of other ways of engaging with it that go beyond normative historiography, normative kind of practices of academia? Yeah, these are really great questions. Jennifer Morgan is another amazing historian. Her Reckoning with Slavery is a really fantastic book, Laboring Women, Marissa Fuentes.

41:03I mean, some really great historians that are also using, let's say, Black feminist frameworks, which is what we engage in the practicing collective refusal to say, what does that mean in various disciplinary frameworks to use, let's say, a Black feminist framework when doing history, because it actually can be extremely helpful in doing so. So what we did at the Bennis Biennale, I worked with, again, Mi Jin Yoon and Eric Howler of Howler & Yoon.

41:38And we did a sound video piece using the archival fragments from what we had gathered to work on the project. So using the spreadsheets of the names, all of the material that we had gotten from the university and our own research, we used that to kind of compile a visual archive that is meant to kind of evoke the fleetingness of the trace, the archival trace.

42:08And the sonic part are the voices of some of the descendants of the enslaved community at UVA, reading their names of their descendants and unknown names that we recorded. And all of that is mixed. And so we work with a fantastic digital artist, Josh Begley, who helped with us with the video part and the sound part to do that work.

42:39So it's a two-channel video, six-channel audio piece that sort of addresses the unknown. It's called Unknown Unknown is the Piece.

The Unknown Unknown installation at Venice

42:52And that was one of the big challenges that we had right away. It's like, what are we going to do with those we don't know? First name unknown, last name unknown. So we just called them the unknown unknown. And so this was a kind of way of creating a sonic temporal spatial. And so instead of the heavy granite land art, this is done with fabric. So it's an elevated light fabric. If the stonemason and the brick maker or the people, the memorial in Charlottesville recognizes the fabric,

43:25the washerwomen, the domestics, the seamstresses, sort of honoring kind of their labor. So it's a different way of revisiting that archive, perhaps more with a twist on and an attentiveness to what we don't know, the unknown unknown. In the unknown unknown project at Venice, I liked your use of kind of tactility and materialness. And it's interesting and suddenly jumped into mind Edwin Lutyens' memorial in London, Memorial to the Unknown Soldier.

44:01I think it's quite interesting. I've always loved that piece of work because of its abstraction. But it's interesting that this is where the monarch, the state of the British state, places its wreaths, sort of distancing itself to a certain degree through the abstraction of that memorial and through the naming of that memorial. From the responsibility, those in places of political authority have for the death of all of those men on the fields of Flanders and on the fields of France.

44:34So I've always been a bit like unsure about the unknown. And I know, as you said before, there's this idea of sort of an empowerment or potential empowerment or certainly a deep meaning in the idea of keeping that ambiguity. How does the material world that you're dealing with, or the material palette, sorry, that you're dealing with in Unknown Unknown, sort of, I guess, resist that abstraction, that alienation? Does it? You're allowed to say, no, you're talking horseshit.

45:06That's also acceptable.

45:11That's a great question. I liked the tactile evidence at Venice. I liked the material qualities that you brought to it. I thought that that was quite a powerful, phenomenological move. It's sort of, on the one hand, holding back from naming, but on the other hand, enabling a kind of bodily or embodied knowing. Yeah, I think that, I think part of the project was really sort of dealing with the fragment. You know, that's why, you know, they're separate sheets.

45:44It's not continuous. The projection is fragmented already. Like the actual projection itself. We wanted the bleed. We actually calculated. We had a really great team. Gene Kahn, Justin Tam, that worked with us on the project, you know, so that we, everything, we really did actually calibrate the bleed on the walls, everything. So that there was this kind of sense of the fragmentation. The video of the images is actually based on the spreadsheet that we used for the names in the actual memorial.

46:22So like, what if there were 4,000? What would that mean? When do we have a known or an unknown? So there actually is a kind of metric there. So there is a kind of, and there is a kind of metric to the sound. There's a beat that plays, very deep bass, that is meant to have a visceral response. So very, again, a very embodied response to it. You know, I think it's just maybe recognizing more of the fragmentary nature of the archive than the actual memorial, which has a kind of arc.

46:54You go in and you come out. But it's more like a timeline, even though the narrative is provisional. And I think this one is really kind of recognizing its fragmentation so that the gaps become much more evident in a way. And so I just think it's a different expression of form, again, challenging the idea of the memorial being what it is. And I do think that the modern Kirk Savage, who's an amazing historian who writes a lot on memorials, you know, just says a lot of the ways in which the keeping of data and information, you know, that modern states do when dealing with soldiers at war came out of the American Civil War.

47:35And the Union in particular, trying to keep track of so many soldiers who are being enlisted and then dying and knowing where they died and trying to retrieve their remains and report to their families. And what do you do when are there are those the remains of the person that's buried here? Or, you know, and so it just raises a lot of a lot of questions around, you know, how that that happens. Like, I would just say the Holocaust, on the other hand, is just like, you know, bookkeeping on steroids. It was just like, we have to keep everything every deep, you know, the Nazis were obsessed with keeping every single detail of everyone.

48:10And so, you know, you get these incredibly wide, where, you know, you know, situation where you know nothing, others where you can almost find out too much about what, you know, who people were and their horrific fate in the case of the Holocaust. But, you know, but these are different, they do different work, I think, in terms of then what do you do with the actual physical form and the information that the archive yields.

Who Builds Your Architecture project

48:35I want to finish on one final question, Mabel. You also have another project called Who Builds Your Architecture. WBYA. And that seems to me to start bringing some of this interrogation and this discourse from your work around the African-American experience of architecture, the Black experience of architecture, into wider practice knowledge. Can you speak perhaps to what Who Builds Your Architecture is doing and whether and how you see connections between Black lexicon, Practical Refusal Collective and this work?

49:10Sure. I mean, Who Builds Your Architecture started Karambari, Bakshi and I. Karambari is a fantastic architect, designer, thinker, maker at Barnard College. And we had heard about the Gulf labor movement who were challenging the use of workers on job sites. These were immigrant workers on job sites in places like Abu Dhabi. There was a whole history of how workers were coming from places like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, all over, and coming to work on these amazing projects for Jean Nouvel or Frank Gehry or whomever.

49:57And Gulf labor was saying, but, you know, people are dying on the job sites. They're living in untenable conditions. But it was interesting because we weren't hearing about any of this in the architectural press. Like, there was nothing being said about who is building your buildings. And so we just started asking people about it and got always the same thing. That's not our purview. That's the client's relationship with the contractor. I have nothing to do with the workers, as Zaha put it. Exactly. Exactly.

50:28And so, you know, again, I mean, this is, this was something that was hidden, not talked about, unknown. We thought we'll do a, maybe you do one panel at the New School.

50:42And, you know, we had somebody from Human Rights Watch, Peggy Deamer, who eventually started an effort to organize workers, architects, which came out of that conversation. And just to talk about, like, well, what is this? And I remember Peggy said, well, how do you expect architects to have good labor practices on job sites when they have such shitty labor practices in their offices? And then it just kind of snowballed. And then we were like, oh, well, there's so much to figure out here. Where are workers? What are these projects?

51:13And so we thought this was a very important thing for people to be aware of and to have conversations about and to engage. And, you know, we were just pleased that so many people were interested, especially people who are teaching things in, like, professional prac. I never thought I'd be working on, you know, projects that, a project that people would want to use in a professional practice class, but apparently. And we had great collaborators, Jordan Carver, Lindsay Wickstrom.

51:44It was just really a fantastic group of Laura, Diamond Dixit. It was just a really great, Tiffany Rattray, just a great group of people. And we used, again, methods, architectural representations to make visible those relationships. And so that's why we did our Who Builds Your Architecture critical field guide, is what we called it, so that people knew what the terms were, what the conditions were, how does one talk about this?

52:15What is our relationship to the people who build buildings? And, you know, we were just pleased that, you know, we were able to get that out there and to incite dialogue. And, you know, the biggest surprise was that people would, you know, try to organize architects in their own offices, which was great. It is great. It's really great. It's very inspiring. Mabel, it's a good point to finish. Thank you so very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

53:09And thanks for listening.

53:39Thank you.