CRUNCH: “unknown, unknown”

In her essay Venus in Two Acts, scholar Saidiya Hartman asks how can one construct a narrative of the captive and the enslaved “without committing further violence in my own act of narration?” Mabel O. Wilson’s presentation “unknown, unknown” will share counter histories and architectures that draw from transatlantic archives of slavery. She positions the archive as resource to consider how violence is enacted in its formation and in acts of retrieval from its collections fundamental to the making of historical narratives and knowledge. When working within such archives, ones born out of ideologies and infrastructures of captivity, how does epistemic erasure and material absence influence what can and cannot be known and what can and cannot be said? 

This talk will be followed by a panel discussion and responses with PhD students from The Bartlett School of Architecture: Sarah Akigbogun, Kirti Durelle and Feysa Poetry. The event will be chaired by Dr Stamatis Zografos, The Bartlett School of Architecture. A drinks reception will take place in G.01, 22 Gordon Street.

This event is part of the inaugural CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, replacing the International Lecture Series. Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. 

Speaker Biographies

Mabel O. Wilson, PhD. is the Rupp Professor of Architecture and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been most recently featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale and SFMoMA. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). For MoMA, she co-curated of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). 

More information

Image: Unknown, Mabel O Wilson