Chances are you've never heard of my country.
I come from a place called Republica.
Republica is a free Black republic,
established on the shores of Mississippi in 1811.
The way that I think through the Reconstruction era,
as an architect, is through counter-narrative.
There's one story of what happened,
and then there's the story of what almost happened,
or what might have happened.
R:R is a place that we both know and don't know.
It's a version of New Orleans where
architecture is reinvented from
Black resistance and liberation.
I worked on this project as a designer
in collaboration with the artist Kristina Kay Robinson,
who is a native of New Orleans.
She came up with this idea of Republica,
which is a fictional nation state
where the rebellion against slavery of 1811,
the largest uprising against slavery in
North America, is imagined as successful.
I was interested in Republica being an agent,
being a site for this new work.
Collaborating with Kristina Kay Robinson
allowed me to step into that
potential with a whole body of
knowledge about not just the history of this event,
but also the history of Black and
indigenous practices from that event onwards.
For me, it was really important
to collaborate because collaboration
allows the architecture to be in dialogue in
a way that could be open to thinking of
radical alternatives to what we know.
I didn't want to design an object.
I wanted to figure out
a way of doing architecture that was
Blacker than any way I had ever done architecture before,
to tell a story really of Black resistance and Black liberation.
The character that you see, created and played
by Kristina Kay Robinson, is Maryam de Capita,
the imaginary founder of Republica.
And that character is narrating the story of Republica.
Maryam is facing you
just as the architecture is facing you,
and inviting you into this imagination.
The geographies of resistance
that start to open up in Republica,
force a different imagination of what
might happen in swampland, in wetlands.
These are the places of resistance and fugitivity,
and they are also, in the reality that we know,
the places of exploitation.
One of the aspects of New Orleans,
as we know it that also appears in
Republica is the repetition of the square.
Historically, the city is first planned as
a colonial enterprise in 100 meter by 100 meter squares.
And that 100 meter really fascinated me,
because it's a kind of hyperrational geometry.
So in Republica what
the architecture postulate is that there could
be a way of continuing
this hyperrationality of the square,
but doing it in a way that embraces
Black cultural practices and
the materiality of the wetlands.
Collectively,
these squares produce hurricane resistance and produce
a shared ground for building much denser and
taller structures than we would
usually think of in New Orleans.
In thinking about Republica as
an independent Black nation state,
part of what's implied is that
it would not necessarily depend
upon the industrialized building materials
of the United States as we know it.
The bamboo with the felt woven around it
is a building method that could replace carpentry.
Building upon the skills of someone who would braid hair,
the skills of someone who would produce textiles with
patterns, working with felt or soft material.
There's no invention of a new braid or a new weave.
R:R is presenting this idea
that with the knowledge that we already have,
we could be building in a way that we don't know yet.
If we think about Black liberation as something
that almost happened and didn't happen,
it means that there is
a Black architecture history that has been subjugated.
And so I started to think of this as a
missing 200 years of Black architecture history.
In a way, Republica and working on Republica
architecturally is an homage to the Black resistance.
But it's also a way of seeing New Orleans
not through the tropes that
we often bring in architecture,
but seeing New Orleans as
a place where resistance continues.
For me, it's important that architecture
not just repeat the world as we know it,
but be in dialogue with imagining another version,
a different world.
A different world that is possible.