Kamukunji errant_praxis

In this episode errant_praxis collaborator DK Osseo-Asare speaks with architect, novelist and visionary educator  Dr. Lesley Lokko, an architect, educator and best-selling author. She served as founding Head of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, and is incoming Dean and Professor at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City University of New York in New York City. She holds MArch from The Barlett and a PhD from the University of London. She is a frequent contributor to The Architectural Review (London), edited the pioneering book, White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, and founded FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture (GSA Imprints). Prof. Lokko has authored numerous works of fiction, academic book chapters, scholarly publications; serves on architectural juries internationally; and speaks regularly to architecture and design audiences world-wide.

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2019/06/07/lesley-lokko-named-dean-of-ccnys-bernard-and-anne-spitzer-school-of-architecture/

https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/architecture

The Graduate School of Architecture - University of Johannesburg, South Africa:

http://www.gsa.ac.za/

African Mobilities:

http://africanmobilities.org/

In this episode errant_praxis curator, Patti Anahory speaks with architect and curator Paula Nascimento. Paula is an architect and curator with degrees from the Architectural Association School of Architecture and from the LSB University in London.Has collaborated with architecture studios in Oporto and in London before funding with Stefano Pansera Beyond Entropy Africa in 2011 – a research-based collective network that operates on the fields of architecture-urbanism-visual arts and geopolitics. Paula has also been a consultant on a variety of projects including the Angola Pavilion for Expo Milano 2015 and often collaborates with different artist institutions and collectives, both on the continent and abroad, and is a founding member of Colectivo Pés Descalços, a Luanda based multi-disciplinary collective developing projects in the cultural field.

Photo of Paula Nascimento by Mário Macilau.

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.paulanascimento.com/en/

Colectivo Pés Descalços:

https://www.facebook.com/PesDescalcosCC/

Beyond Entropy

https://www.facebook.com/BeyondEntropyLtd/

Golden Lion award for Angola at the Venice Biennale 2013:

https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/angola-marks-venice-biennale-debut-with-a-victory/

Architectural Association School of Architecture:
https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/

In this episode we hear from Counterspace - a Johannesburg-based collaborative architectural studio, directed by an all-women team of Sumayya Vally, Amina Kaskar and Sarah de Villiers. The firm is dedicated to architectural projects, exhibition design, art installation visualisation, public events curation and urban design, which  are often rigorously research-based . Counterspace uses Johannesburg - its landscapes, its systems, people and rituals - as their main inspiration for creating and approaching projects, with an aim toward developing a uniquely Johannesburg and African design language. Their work is predominantly concerned with identity, otherness and imagining new futures; using image and narrative as a means to deconstruct and reconstruct their city.

In this episode Patti Anahory speaks with Tuliza Sindi,  a lecturer of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) and is the founder and CEO of South African-based experimental firm BRNWSH. She obtained her qualifications at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). She has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand as well as Tshwane University of Technology and is regularly invited to examine student work across several schools of architecture in South Africa.

Her firm explores the socio-political construct of ‘service’ as a concept on which coloniality is both built upon and functions from; with service (as both verb and noun) being a condition that has and continues to function as a tool of permission, participation, legitimization, influence, dehumanization, exceptionalism, nobility and absolution. Service, and its many iterations, occupies 0.1% of the bible’s teachings as it remains framed as one of the most significant pillars on the spectrum of virtues that constitute healthy social practice and construction. Service has, however, provided the vehicle for the continued creation and abuse of power. The firm explores the implications of this construct and consequence of service on the make-up of societies and their corresponding spatial practices.

BRNWSH borrows from and creates language for various disciplines, including media, linguistics, economics, sociology and psychology.

https://www.brnwsh.co.za/

Soundtrack: Construction next door!

Mentioned:

Graduate School of Architecture - University of Johannesburg, South Africa

http://www.gsa.ac.za

Christina Sharpe's book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6294-4_601.pdf

In this episode Patti Anahory speaks with Sean Anderson about the complex relationship between the curator and the institution. They  discuss curating as (potentially) a critical and political practice, one that could feed on or confront the inherited (exclusionary) legacies of institutions.

Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, he has degrees in architectural design and architectural history from Cornell University, an M. Arch from Princeton University and a Ph.D in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the U.A.E. His book, Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea, was published in 2015 and was nominated for the AIFC Bridge Book Award for Non-Fiction. At MoMA, he manages the Young Architects Program and has organized the exhibitions Thinking Machines. Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989 (2018), Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016), and is currently working on two exhibitions for 2020-21: the first will observe aspects of spatial justice in the American city and the second, South Asian post-independence modern architecture.

Sean mentioned:

MoMA
https://www.moma.org/
Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1653

Patti mentioned:
Fred Wilson - Mining the Museum project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSKTbwYVM6g
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

***Episode image created from an institution-icon from:

Icon made from Icon Fonts is licensed by CC BY 3.0

In this episode, Patti Anahory interviews Gabriela Leandro Pereira, professor of architecture and urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.

Professor Gabriela Leandro speaks about her work with Coletiva Terra Preta, a collective of five Afro-Brazilian women who created the podcast series ‘Des-embraquecendo a Cidade’, loosely translated to "de/un-whitening the city".

bio

Gabriela Leandro Pereira is an architect and urban planner. She graduated from the Federal University of Espírito Santo and obtained her masters and doctorate in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Bahia, both in Brazil. She won the Thesis Prize with her dissertation entitled  "Body, discourse and territory: City in dispute in the narrative of Carolina Maria de Jesus". She is a professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador. Her main areas of research and teaching are: narrative, history and memory of the city; the history of architecture and urbanism; contemporary urban processes; urban politics and culture.

transcript in **english** available at:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1yUxffdehvZ0iNJ_8B718wljAOzqUBwXr

 

In this episode Gabriela Leandro mentioned:

’Des-embranquecendo a Cidade’ - podcast series

https://open.spotify.com/show/32m8V5IJsSlaE55ubXjH00?si=WOh3ft20Q9eozgOXN1Wzag

https://www.archdaily.com.br/br/923493/des-embranquecendo-a-cidade

Gabriela Leandro Pereira’s PhD thesis:

https://www.scribd.com/document/357966861/Tese-gabriela-Leandro-Pereira

Colectiva Terra Preta: Emmily Leandro, Gabriela Leandro Pereira (Gaia), Luciana Mairynk, Maria Luiza de Barros(Malu), Natalia Alves:

https://medium.com/@terrapreta/des-embranquecendo-a-cidade-c5635dd0c2ff

Encontro Nacional da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional:

http://anpur.org.br/xviiienanpur/anaisadmin/capapdf-sl.php?reqid=179

http://anpur.org.br/xviiienanpur/

Gloria E. Anzaldúa - scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory

Beatriz Nascimento - was an Afro-Brazilian academic and activist

Castiel Vitorino - artist, a psychology student and macumba practicer

Carolina Maria de Jesus - was a Brazilian writer from São Paulo, Brazil. One of her best known work is her diary which was published as Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus.

Leda Maria Martins - Brazilian poet, essayist, academic and playwright. See [in english] "Spiral Time: An Approach to African-Brazilian Ritual Cosmovision."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGt8Jaeke9Q