Clouds It was the year 1954 when the “Department of Tropical Architecture“ was founded at the Architectural Association (AA) London, by Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and their colleague James Cubbitt. Tropical architecture had been a topic before the study programs foundation, large conferences like the “Conference on tropical architecture” March 1953 at University College, London or two years before in Venezuela had established the issue internationally. The AA Tropical Architecture study program ran till 1971 and was afterwards transferred to the University of London and proceeded there as the “Development Planning Unit” that is active till today. The AA program included lectures ...

As many of us are currently confined at home in many places of the world, and while we keep in our minds and in our hearts those who have no choice but to be at risk from the ongoing worldwide pandemic, because they’re doctors, nurses, cashiers, workers, homeless, incarcerated, or in any other precarious situation, we wanted to provide you with a daily podcast to use this time to reflect and organizing without talking about the pandemic itself — there might be already enough about it. The concept is very simple. Every day, we ask one person the same question: “what ...

Charles Correa (*1930 in Secunderabad) has played an instrumental role in the shaping of postcolonial architecture in India. He has also been a pioneer in addressing crucial issues of housing and urbanization in the Third World, including the proliferation of squatters. This anthology assembles a selection of essays and lectures whose subjects range from the metaphysical to the decidedly pragmatic and deal with architecture, urban planning, landscape, and individuals such as Le Corbusier, Isambard Brunel, and Mahatma Gandhi. It also contains a reprint of his seminal book The New Landscape (1985), long out of print, on urban development in the Third ...

Walter Mignolo (1941, Córdoba, Argentina) is a semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. In “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses,” Mignolo reads through the Museum of Islamic Art and of Asian Civilizations Museum, attempting to decolonize the single story of western museums by showing how de-westernization works. The author’s argument will be that the de-colonial story of western museums through the appropriation of the museum model ...

This conversation with Fabiola López-Durán is primarily structured around her work exploring Le Corbusier’s eugenic ideology from 1925 Paris to 1941 Vichy. At a moment when many events and debates are organized around his paradigmatic work, the main critiques seem to focus on his personal political engagement and ideology without fully engaging with the work and its consequences. What Fabiola proposes in her work is to take his claims for the orthopedic power of architecture seriously, and look at the vision of society it is therefore promoting. Although Le Corbusier’s example might be canonical, her argument is that the entire ...

During the Algerian Revolution the French colonial regime designated large areas as zones interdites (forbidden zones), which consisted of free-fire zones for French military air and ground forces, and were to be cleared of any living beings. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians were forcibly evacuated from the forbidden zones and transferred into militarily controlled camps dubbed the centres de regroupement. Based on private and institutional archives, including the French Service cinématographique des armées (SCA), the exhibition at Archive Kabinett, curated by Samia Henni, features certain aspects of the massive forced resettlement of civilians, and disclosures the ways with which the ...

This conversation with Alexander Weheliye is built upon the critique he made of the work of Giorgio Agamben, in particular in his essentialization of the muselmann in the context of the Holocaust. Alexander argues that slavery functions as a better paradigm to understand the “layering” of bare lives and the racial aspects that this understanding involves. He explains how he is interested in finding other ways to “claim humanity” than the traditional judicial one that attributes this status in a retroactive manner to suffering bodies. In order to do so, we evoke the works of major African-American and black Caribbean thinkers such as ...

The word “classic” in the title of this special issue of Selva might seem to some a misnomer. Rather than consistently use any of the rich traditions of the concept from various sub-discplines of art history—say, Mesoamerican or Chinese—or address the contested self-identification of the academic field of “Classics” itself, I have thought about the operational role of this word in all the different art histories I have worked with. (I was for a few years responsible for creating and managing a non-Eurocentric introductory art history course with the help of colleagues and collaborators. My level of engagement in various ...

This e-book offers the findings of the conference ‘Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating “Black Artists & Modernism” in Europe After 1968’ at the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 7–9 December 2017, presented by Black Artists & Modernism in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum. The conference and the accompanying e-publication gathered artists, curators and academics to consider two broad, overarching questions: Firstly, how to rethink conceptualism intersectionally and internationally as a strategy rather than as a movement; and secondly how to situate ‘black artists’ and ‘modernism’ within Europe? The conference and corresponding publication includes key note lectures by Iris Dressler and ...

The first episode of the series Corona Under the Ocean is dedicated to Oceania. Did you know that the Pacific Ocean was named so by Ferdinand Magellan, referring to his feeling that the sea was dull over there? In this conversation Greg Dvorak, Professor of International Cultural Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, reflects on how the colonizer’s view has affected the region and, on how the word indigenous needs to gain even more political meaning.

The seventh episode, with curator Camila Marambio is an approach to Tierra del Fuego from her personal experience with a part of the world with which she has a strong emotional connection. As she states, Tierra del Fuego, “despite its remoteness, is the center of the world.” Karokynka is the name by which this area of the world is known by the native Selk’nam people, a culture that still survives in its descendants despite its official death by the modern state of Chile. The fact of proclaiming as dead a culture that is still very much alive is part of ...

The e-publication Decolonising Archives aims to show how archives bear testimony to what was, even more so than collections. Archives present documents that allow one to understand what happened and in which order. Today Internet technology, combined with rapid moves made on the geopolitical chessboard, make archives a contested site of affirmation, recognition and denial. As such, it is of great importance to be aware of processes of colonialisation and decolonisation taking place as new technology can both be used to affirm existing hegemonic colonial relationships or break them open. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack ...