It is not rare to see projects and installations during architecture events linked in some ways with other disciplines such as fashion or textile design. At times the connection is maybe not so clear, but, when you read about the project and check out the people who worked on it, things become clearer.
There is for example a project on display at the U.S. Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (closing on Sunday 25th November) that has some strong connections with hair braiding.
The U.S. Pavilion - commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and The University of Chicago (UChicago) - is entitled "Dimensions of Citizenship" and includes a series of projects trying to envisage what it is like to be a citizen today.
Seven transdisciplinary teams comprising architects, landscape architects, theorists and artists analysed issues and notions of citizenship through projects tackling contemporary social, political, economic and environmental issues such as the meaning of home, the right to public space, the uses of civic monuments and the dynamics of borderlands and global migration according to different parameters - Citizen, Civitas, Region, Nation, Globe, Network, and Cosmos.
Inside the pavilion it is possible to look at projects such as Studio Gang's Stone Stories, inspired by the cobblestone-paved landing on the Mississippi River, or SCAPE's Ecological Citizens, exploring intertidal architectural artifacts such as sediment fences and biodegradable coir logs and their use in the Venetian Lagoon.
Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman's "Mexus" challenges instead the concept of natural boundaries via a mural-sized visualization of the watersheds, indigenous lands, ecological corridors, and migratory patterns between Mexico and the United States, suggesting new transborder collaborations rather than divisions.
Geography characterises Design Earth's Cosmorama, questioning the legal geography of citizenship and the frontier narratives that have fueled space exploration and off-planet settlements, while mobility is at the core of Keller Easterling with MANY's project suggesting a platform to facilitate migration through an exchange of needs.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko with Columbia Center for Spatial Research look at places in the world with many people and no lights, and those with bright lights and no people, to highlight the political and social realities of being invisible in plain sight and the exclusion Vs inclusion dichotomy.
The theme of invisibility is somehow linked to the project by visual artist and architect Amanda Williams and artist, designer, and educator Andres L. Hernandez in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist and hairstylist Shani Crowe.
Their intervention entitled "Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line)" consists in a structure installed in the U.S. Pavilion's courtyard that seems to be partially attached to its roof.
Made of steel and covered with hand-braided cords, this sort of tactile sculpture in black with a golden yellow interior symbolising the brightness and light we carry inside us, sits prominently in the courtyard: you can interpret it as a hut or a shelter, but first and foremost it illustrates ideas of black spatial practice and points towards an architecture inclusive of all citizens.
Though the structure is a separate entity from the main building it still belongs to it, it is unignorable as you can't look at the pavilion without seeing it, but, with its presence, it hints at issues of liminality and marginalisation, at African Americans being overlooked and ignored, made transparent by a white society. The structure becomes therefore a way for African Americans to take space and claim back their ownership on that space.
The work is also linked with black women and with the way they navigated and shaped space to advance their position in American society, and in particular it is inspired by Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Tubman.
Jacobs confined herself for seven years to a tiny crawlspace above a porch built in her grandmother's house to escape from the harassment of her master; Tubman found emancipation for herself and others through the network of safe houses and supporters from the southern to the northern US states and Canada known as The Underground Railroad. So, posing questions about race, fugitivity and public space, the structure hints at the importance of black space and the black female body, a concept summarised in the exhibition catalogue with the mantra "BLACK WOMEN SPACE MATTERS".
Visitors can enter this space, take shelter in it and sit to have their hair cared and braided, the open space allowing people to enter it becoming part of the installation.
Fans of textile artworks may see in the piece echoes of Mrinalini Mukherjee's humanoid sculptures made with woven hemp, after all the hut could be considered also as a sort of maternal goddess, and the braids it is made of are proof of Crowe's art and artisanship.
A Chicago native, Crowe is an extraordinary braider: a couple of years ago she became known as the maker of the braided Swarowski crystal embellished hair halo she did for Solange's performance on Saturday Night Live (a 50-hour labor of love).
Her work (that you can admire in her Instagram feed Crowezilla) was also elevated to art and immortalised in photographic exhibitions in which real women are portrayed in her elaborate hairstyles (and in images reminiscent of the photographs of intricately sculpted and braided hairstyles from Nigeria by J.D.'Okhai Ojeikere).
Exploited as a cool trend by the fashion scene, braiding is ingrained in black culture and beauty and for Crowe it is a sacred art. Yet braided hairstyles are still contested in some professional spaces, so that the architectural conversation behind this structure brings to the foreground issues of citizenship, freedom, space, power/empowerment, beauty and style.
Image credits for this post
1. and 10. Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) by Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez, in collaboration with Shani Crowe at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
2 to 9 and 11. Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) by Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez, in collaboration with Shani Crowe at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion. Photo © Anna Battista
12. (from left to right) Amanda Williams, Shani Crowe, and Andres L. Hernandez with Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line). Photo © Francesca Bottazzin. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
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