Kaleidoscopic No. 16: Maya Alam & Daniele Profeta, A/P Practice - Part two
Leonardo Bravo:
Let’s discuss one more project to round out the practice.
Maya Alam:
It's not on the website yet, but in terms of the trajectory of this conversation, we thought it would be interesting to talk about us moving back to Europe and moving to Berlin, where for us, it also started a little bit of a shift where the interdisciplinary practice starts meeting collaborations that work fluidly with activism. Art and public space together. We were thinking about how it then starts to move forward from there. Because we learned a lot from the Dekoloniale Berlin residency last summer, the most extensively interdisciplinary collaboration we have done so far.
Maya Alam:
We worked with a writer from Uganda, Lulu Jemimah, who won the writing residency, the visual artist Vitjitua Ndjiharine who won the visual arts residency, and the entire landscape of activism is so multi-layered in Berlin. So we worked with Dekoloniale Berlin, but we also worked with Berlin Postkolonial, Nyabinghi Lab, Contemporary& and Robbie Aitkin, who is writing books on the history of black resistance in Germany and then started to think about how our work begins to fit into this conversation.
The collaboration with Lulu was and continues to be extraordinarily productive in the sense of how these two radically different media can start operating and informing one another.
Leonardo Bravo:
I will just make a quick comment as you're going along. I'm drawn to architecture because I feel that, ultimately, it is about storytelling. It's about cultural histories and memory, it's about spatial and material realities that are able to inform our sense of place, our sense of being, and there's a built-in sense of histories and stories in much of the practice. And then, of course, there's a speculative sense. In the sense of how we encounter and speculate new dimensions of understanding of who we are through spatial environments. But it's fascinating to hear that you are connecting and intersecting directly with artists or practices that are informed by narrative and cultural memory, and informing your practice as well.
Maya Alam:
In that sense, the ongoing project that is still happening in Berlin, obviously with the artists and activists that are still working on it, Lulu is still working on it, is this piece of history, an architectural history of our site that we worked on during the residency, which is based on a theater play that was put together in the 1930s, it was called ‘Sonnenaufgang im Morgenland, ‘ and it was put together by black German activists as a form of resistance. So this piece of performance speaks to the idea of resistance or activism having a long legacy of histories and people existing in these spaces that the rest of the world understands as predominantly white.
Maya Alam:
Lulu's work was about working with interviews with activists and historians to try and create a new theater piece based on this history. What was interesting to us is that they actually found the original space where the play took place in the 1930s, and right now, it's under reconstruction for becoming a gallery space in Kreuzberg, which is also layered in terms of urban space and conversations around gentrification and around who does our city belong to really. So the fact that this space still existed while we were there in the summer, while it was going through renovation, and you could see the different layers over the last hundred years, the straw layers, the linoleum layers, the mirror foil of the seventies club…and we actually got to 3D scan the entire space before the complete renovation.
Maya Alam:
So taking from our spatial architectural practice and developing a three-dimensional digital archive, and then working with Lulu on the scenography for the play was so incredibly productive: to start thinking about how to create an archive and make it accessible for a broader audience but also how do you inter-disciplinarily start working together to challenge more than one history that can be taught through a space.
Daniele Profeta:
And designing the scenography as the backdrop for the story that the actors were performing, I think, was a really beautiful way of working between the foreground and the background, in a sense resonating with the way that the built environment operates, like the idea of this ever-present and yet somewhat escaping background, holding the multiple material traces of this site and animating it in a way that could take advantage of the storytelling opportunities of the medium to problematize the multiple timelines that were being stitched together.
Daniele Profeta:
So she was jumping between 1930 and 2020 to question the sort of assumptions of what may have changed and what, unfortunately, has not changed - similarly to the way that we were using the 3D scans as a way of mapping past traces and embedding new cues to problematize the idea of the linear timeline of progress. So this piece does a fantastic job of describing the character of a text that is destroyed as it's being read: a piece constantly undoing itself while it's being presented to a new audience, right? So this is speaking about the decolonizing undoing practice as an ongoing process, one that does not have a fixed end goal, but rather it is a continuous collective practice of remaking the roots and the collective history and your own past—the collective history of a community.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm intrigued that you are based out of various nodes such as Berlin, Florence, and you have positions here in the US and just because of my recent experience in Berlin, having this understanding of the density of history in Europe, particularly the fragmentary layers, the topographies that are present. Compared to a place like LA, where everything's so open, there's a sense of horizontal flatness, and the perception of history tends to be ephemeral and illusory. So what's your reality at navigating these various activation sites around history and geography? Being in Berlin, there's almost a phantasmagoric and haunting quality to how the fragments of history appear and reappear.
Daniele Profeta:
We both cherish and struggle with the kind of transient background we've built for ourselves. I like the idea that we are challenging ourselves to always consider the idea of home as malleable: like the feeling of belonging. But also, it is like a way of not quite feeling content when that feeling of home begins to feel too fixed or rooted. And I don't think it's by chance that, almost like a regular interval after ten years, we choose to move to a new place.
Daniele Profeta:
In that sense, I think it's beautiful for us to look back and think about the different elements we have extrapolated from each context we lived and operated within. So, for example, the opportunities that we were able to find in the US, from our graduate education to the influence of working alongside small-scale collaborative practices operating in a very fluid way between academia, art, exhibition spaces, and architecture, there is a dimension to that, especially to the architecture practice that I think we did not witness as much growing up in Europe.
Daniele Profeta:
That has remained in our practice's DNA, and it continues to be one of the lineages through which we decide which project we want to commit to - where we want to invest our time and energies. For example, choosing to maintain one of our footholds in Italy is a way for us to continue problematizing ideas of historicity and to look at sites not as monolithic entities but as layered archives, constituted by contrasting and yet coexisting conditions.
Daniele Profeta:
That's something to cherish rather than be frustrated about. It is essential to continue problematizing where one recognizes value in a site, and again, when we use the word site, we mean in the broader sense possible - the existing condition, whether it's a piece of material, whether it's a piece of writing, a room, or a building site. While in Germany, there is an accelerated fusion between activism, art, and public spaces, something we were not able to engage with elsewhere.
Leonardo Bravo:
So in centering your work around social and cultural histories, how are you embedding or gaining an understanding of these intersections? I was thinking of the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Lesley Lokko, putting a spotlight on Africa and the African diaspora, those perspectives, those histories and multiple sense of perspectives and understandings into the architectural practice.
Maya Alam:
I think for us, to go full circle, it has something to do with what you mentioned earlier about the biases embedded in the methodologies as well as the tools we use in our work: does the scanner have implicit biases?
Maya Alam:
I would say yes, maybe not as obvious as those found in Kodak's Shirley cards, but it has something to do with its positioning in history and space. If you continue to position yourself and the scanner following the same way the Renaissance perspective was made, you're reproducing the same modes of vision, right? And with it, the same kind of ideologies. We are influenced by how Nicholas Mirzoeff, among others, talks about it in his "Right To Look" book: a decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the moment any emperor started to have too vast of a territory to control it directly, somebody else needed to survey what you cannot see, and it becomes beyond your perception…
Leonardo Bravo:
The horizon of empire?
Maya Alam:
Exactly! And you see the development of a series of surveying and imaging technologies articulating an idea of ‘drawing’ territories to establish control over them. So we are committed to working within that historical and physical connection between modes of vision and asymmetrical power structures. A relationship that, while it begins to be more recognized in public discourse today, perhaps showing the first signs of institutions trying to catch up, has much longer roots. I think every person from a marginalized group would agree that it always has existed, right?
Leonardo Bravo:
The struggle has always been there.
Maya Alam:
It always has been. Connecting these broader histories to an idea of interdisciplinary, experimental practice is at the core of our interests.
Daniele Profeta:
Absolutely. And from my perspective, the venue of teaching is another fundamental space where we can engage with some issues that are not so easily deployable in the space of a single project. From the development of a curriculum to the definition of a design-studio prompt, there are many invaluable opportunities to articulate design sensibilities and methodologies to support students in an engagement with the political, social, material, and ecological layers embedded in the built environment.
Daniele Profeta:
And for students, it's critical to be aware of the forms of coloniality embedded in the academic structure, the many ways of gatekeeping ingrained in pedagogical structures, and reinforcing student vs. master dichotomies. We need to leave this model behind; the sooner, the better, and be able to support designers and thinkers of tomorrow in a way that they can, more individually and from their own perspectives, inform the task of design.
Daniele Profeta:
How can students recognize and find agency in engaging the built environment to produce forms of knowledge and communication for their unique design and research practice? For us, this becomes a valuable space to test and share ideas with even more people than the ones with whom we collaborate within the practice. And it acts as an echo chamber, where we are able to produce more spaces for a conversation spanning between teaching and practicing, to let both influence one another. This is an excellent way for us to position our work and continue to develop the conversation with broader audiences.
Leonardo Bravo:
Finally, what's inspiring you right now? What are you looking forward towards the horizon? What are you admiring? That's a fun and easy question!
Maya Alam:
This was another tough conversation between us on how to answer that one!
Maya Alam:
So our discussion was like, should we answer this with a book, with a movie, with music?
Daniele Profeta:
How seriously are we taking each other because sometimes, you know, the image of the professional gets so overwhelmingly present, and we forget to, you know, be humans?
Leonardo Bravo:
Maybe just like, what are you watching on Netflix? <laughs>
Daniele Profeta:
On a serious note, we are very much looking forward to this summer, working at the Salzburg Summer Academy, where we are teaching what we think is going to be a stimulating three-week course titled ‘Beyond the Survey’—precisely continuing some of this conversation around how surveying practices can become active moments of resistance, as well as moments of establishing a presence of a subject onto a site. We're looking forward to working with students from architecture but also from various backgrounds, from art, visual arts, sculpture, writers, et cetera. And to collaborate with an institution that has such a longstanding tradition of problematizing architecture as a visual practice. That's really exciting!
Maya Alam:
I think one of the most inspiring reads that I had in the last year was Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism and the way she talks about how we all contain multitudes. I find this so important and fascinating, and thinking about how architecture is always about this, even if we are confronted with a continuous reinforcement of a single perspective, a single ‘right’ way to read, design, produce, etc… Like the figure of the starchitect, or the master teacher versus students. And this book is an incredible resource to unmask this ideological construct and find space to articulate new forms of history and design.
Leonardo Bravo:
And that's profound because, to end it on this note, we are inside, inside the system, we are inside this machine, and it's constantly devouring. I think that's its mission: to devour individuality and completely extract. So in the sense of Glitch Feminism, and then I see it so much related to our conversation and what you talked about in your practice, like where are those glitches that create a disruption, open up that static or that moment where there's some dissonance, and you're able to all of a sudden pull back and see it from a different moment, a different perspective, a different clarity.
Maya Alam:
And then, now that I think about that, maybe giving a shout-out to the person who gave us that reading recommendation, Ibiye Camp. I don't know if you have interviewed her.
Maya Alam:
She would be amazing to interview in your series as well, as how she connects that with her practice. And the conversations we had with her when she lectured, and I interviewed her for a piece I was writing—the expansiveness and absence of singularity as an approach.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well, this has been really delightful. I really hope we get to meet in person and keep the conversations going. I'm always excited about thinking about these as starting points toward larger collaborations. And then, if I'm in Europe during the summer, I'd love to drop into your academy in Salzburg. See it in person!
Maya Alam:
Yes, please!
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