It’s not every week that Chani Nicholas says the astrology is just right for some magic to happen, but this week happens to be one of them (specifically, the Jupiter cazimi on Tuesday: Jupiter, which represents our ability to create abundance, is in conjunction with the Sun, our source of light and life, thus boosting our potential to expand through generosity and generativity). Bad timing for divinely aligned celestial bodies, because I’m still working behind the scenes to evolve Queeries—so a launch is not imminent. But Chani, in her infinite wisdom, asserts: “Astrology reminds us that we are exactly as we are supposed to be for good reason.” So Queeries continues to marinate, I continue to ruminate, and hopefully the process of evolution all be worth it in the end :)
Here’s a peek into the process / progress and trains of thought 🐣
The Black Land Consortium at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture (February 10, 2022) has been on my mind since February, when I viewed parts of it during a seminar portion of a studio that I’m co-teaching this semester. (A huge shout-out to Dark Matter U for representing heavily at this talk!) Exploring themes of Blackness and Land, Emanuel Admassu, Jerome Haferd, Curry Hackett, and Jennifer Newsom speak about how their practices reach beyond settler colonial perspectives to bring into focus the roles that memory, futurism, and human relations play in constructing the built environment. I wonder: what makes a story a myth? Could the unearthing of memories be considered an archaeological project if the intent is to build something new with them? How could oral histories, as an emergent method to capture histories, affect narratives of the built environment? Can we change the built environment by changing the way we live with each other?
This semester (which isn’t over yet!) I am serving on the thesis committee for a queer Master of Architecture student at Savannah College of Art and Design. His research is on fluid architecture, non-gendered space, self-expression, and the techniques and lessons architecture can borrow from fashion design. Part of the struggle of M.Arch theses is the final design output, the culmination of research—which may or may not be a Building in the traditional sense. In response to this struggle, I sent the student the first chapter of Natalie Loveless's How to Make Art at the End of the World. Loveless argues for “research creation,” a way of storytelling / art-making / knowledge-producing that is interdisciplinary, not just because of the topics of research, but because the outputs (i.e., the thesis project) are “in between” disciplines. I’m hoping that this student’s final design will be fluid on multiple levels—so that it is legible and useful to architects, designers, and everyday citizens alike. Subvert those boundaries of architecture!!! I’m remembering: the bottom line is that rethinking the relationship between gender and architecture is a rethinking of how people relate to one another and live with each other in society. And rethinking can occur on a building code level, or a design guideline level, or on a more ephemeral plane akin to fashion.
Last week, Tonia Sing Chi of Peripheral Office interviewed me for her Graham-funded project, Storytelling Spaces of Solidarity in the Asian Diaspora. The initiative engages Asian diasporic designers in learning, building, and practicing intra- and inter-community solidarity, and seeks to create connections (not equivalencies) between Asian diaspora histories and the histories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. I have realized before, and it hit me again, that I do not engage with my own Taiwanese-American identity very often, and certainly not with how it intersects with my queerness. It’s like a black box that I’ve never opened, and I’m not even sure how to approach it. Assimilating and aligning to whiteness has been the most fruitful path to success since grade school—it’s like I’ve been code-switching, but the switch is always on, and I’m not sure how to turn it off. I know: I still have much to learn. I am wary of opening the black box because there is a lot I do not know—I don’t even know what I don’t know. Does becoming comfortable with my Asian American identity involve re-discovering my roots, my culture that I am so disconnected from—my self? How, how, how do I reconcile historical erasure, un-assimilate, and find my place?
Also—thank you, Tonia, for showing grace as I bumbled through barely-formed thoughts… and opening my eyes to best practices for interviews!!! Very excited for the project as it develops.
Last but not least: Spring is really sprangin’, at least in the northeast, and I keep searching my capacious / exorbitant collection of PDFs for a zine about Queer Ecology that I swear I’d just opened last week. I even thought I would write a whole newsletter edition about it, but I cannot. find. that. zine! I’m slightly amused that when I search for “queer ecology” (in quotes!) on my laptop, the first result that pops up is Architectural Graphic Standards. Is my laptop trolling me??? Can you lose a PDF if you download too many of them? Why can’t I just enjoy spring without trying to queer all of nature? Can you imagine a section on queer ecology in Architectural Graphic Standards one day, in the not-so-distant future?
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As always, thank you for reading. I hope these words inspire in some way, shape, or form.
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Until next time,
A.L.