live on Instagram
On Saturday, March 13th at 9 AM PST (12 PM EST | 6 PM CET), Bring a drink to our instagram live! Join #RadicalBlackFemme artist-in-residence, Mia Imani Harrison and stand-up comedian and artist, Nekia “peddyBetty” Hampton in a conversation about notions of "physically manifesting the future they want to live in".
ME, I AM A BUILDING develops a dialogue of how to heal or deconstruct site-specific intergenerational traumas by employing modernist (architecture and literature) methodologies that are equally Black American. Imagine a future where Black people can exist in an open state of joy. For communities like the Black community where the racial pandemic (criminalization, surveillance, and white supremacy) is equally as lethal as the viral pandemic being able to imagine yourself in the future where you can experience freedom is crucial. The fundamental ideological principles of the Bauhaus school and the European modernist movement can become blueprints for marginalized communities that are reimaging how they exist in the present and how they want to live in the future. As activists call for the dismantling of oppressive institutions and historical structures to create a more inclusive and liberating future, I am suggesting that marginal groups turn to the progressive ideologies embedded in modernist buildings and use them as sites to activate their narratives. Accessibility plays a major role in who can afford to physically manifest the future they want to live in.
ME, I AM A BUILDING invites Black femmes to construct a new reality in the moment by using forms that are already built and extending their meaning to fulfill an emancipatory project. Much like the teaching of the Bauhaus, this isn’t the end of the mission but more of an opening of a dialogue. This project will allow me to investigate the histories of the structures and create rituals of movement to bridge the frequencies of freedom for the communities of Black folx that live in Germany and beyond. Modernist architecture created a diaspora of builders as its founders were forced to flee and seek utopia elsewhere. Since these forms of buildings are everywhere it gives folx around the Diaspora a way to reimagine the structures that surround us.
Just as there are costs in building a utopian structure, there are hidden costs related to the exclusion that Black people feel within and around institutional spaces which most of the modernist buildings in the U.S. have become. Although there have been discussions about the role structures play in impacting the collective psyche of a community in terms of white supremist monuments, the impact of modernist architecture on Black communities is under researched and discussed. ME, I AM A BUILDING plans to change that. --