To overcome the exclusionary practices of segregation African-Americans in the
United States have often had to negotiate boundaries,
think about how to be in places in which they were prohibited.
This is very much a spatial idea.
As
a son of the South,
my motivation for choosing Nashville was to recall those who
undertook a radical action,
an action that reconfigured time and space to say
that they were sick and tired of being sick and tired,
demanding their rightful place in society in order to participate
as full citizens unencumbered by the color of their skin. These
were stories which my parents and my grandparents told me about.
And I was interested in thinking about how architecture can relate to
ideas of freedom and liberation.
My project "The Refusal of Space" is a protest machine that visualizes
the experiences of protestors during the civil rights movements of the
1960s.
That very much relates to the recent marches,
protests sit-ins and die-ins of the black lives matter movement that have
been playing out across the United States, across the globe.
Practicing refusal is actually a generative and productive
strategy for making new ways of being seen,
for thinking about other ways in which African-Americans have made their
presences known.
One
of the images that inspired me is a 1960s photo of civil rights
protesters marching in downtown Nashville.
The protestors moved through space, not always in a straight line,
but negotiating boundaries, dealing with the actual infrastructure of the city,
such as highways and intersections.
My project is a full-scale structure that I call a trolley,
which also recalls the agency of African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction
era in 1905,
in response to newly enacted segregation laws.
They formed the first black owned independent street car line and Nashville.
What you will see is a machine that bears a resemblance to a trolley,
but that also includes visual items, such as videos,
projected imagery
and computer modeling.
The trolley is meant to occupy space such that you can move around it and
really get a sense of what it means to take up space and to make
yourself feel present.
You will also see what we call the Black Flag.
We designed the Black Flag to re-contextualize the Confederate flag,
which has been a longtime symbol throughout the South,
as well as being prominent on a number of state flags.
The Black Flag re-choreographs the space around the trolley,
such that it becomes a kind of visual representation of movement
and of coming together.
The trolley is not static.
It also includes three computer generated animations based
upon the routes that civil rights marchers took in 1960,
1961 and 1964 marching through the streets of
downtown Nashville.
The trolley recalls as my grandparents would say "making a way out of no
way." The civil rights protestors and Black Lives Matters protestors
have occupied the city,
have taken over the streets and the sidewalks in order to express themselves
as they redefine space.
Many people consider the definition of architecture as being limited to the
design of buildings.
But I would offer that architecture is much more than that.
Architecture is about making space.
Architecture is about situating relationships within space.
We
can think about space within the urban context, the political context,
the social context,
who has right to those spaces who has power in those spaces and how
do we give everyone access to those kinds of spaces?
I am hoping that this project expands the boundaries
of architecture,
such that we can think of architecture as part of the spatial practice
of liberation. Liberation
is an action and liberation demands action.
While freedom is an idea liberation is spatial.
To be really free is to be spatially free.