Field Trip to Asmara and Addis Ababa
28 January – 8 February, 2019
Course participants traveled to Addis Ababa and Asmara to learn from the ways in which the local residents reused colonial fascist buildings. In Addis Ababa the course collaborated with Rahel Shawl her team at RAAS architecture that has mapped out architecture built during the Italian occupation. In a series of workshops, course participants joined local students, experts, architects and local associations in rethinking the possibility of reuseing one of these building for a center of knowledge production — a space that the RAAS team and Rahel envisioned especially for newly graduated architects. The exhibition organized by the RAAS team at the Urban Center featured a series of architecture built during the Italian occupation, generating an interesting debate around the use of the term decolonization, since Ethiopian was never colonized. In contrast, architectures build in the same period in Asmara were recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2017 under the title of “Asmara: A Modernist African City”. The course participants had a possibility to meet and discuss with the team of architects and conservationists of the Asmara Heritage Project, who prepared the nomination dossier.
Video of the field trip
End of the year Discursive Exhibition: What does it mean “To Decolonize”?
28 May – 29 May, 2019, Stockholm
The struggle of decolonization, once primarily located outside of Europe, has today moved within its borders. What the media continue to call the “refugee crisis”, “environmental crisis” “economic crisis” are, in reality, the incapacity of Europe to come to terms to the condition of five hundred years of colonialism. This public event is divided into three parts: a public seminar that introduces decolonial options and their relevance in the European context, followed by a public lecture by the renowned philosopher Walter D. Mignolo who has spent the last 40 years researching and teaching the historical foundation of the modern/colonial world system and imaginary, concluding with an open discussion on decolonial artistic practices by using as a starting point, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti´s latest book Permanent Temporariness, a collection of research projects developed in over a decade of work within the artistic collective DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency).
Public lecture by Walter Mignolo
Book launch
Seminar
Publication
Decolonizing North
7 December – 8 December, 2017, Stockholm
This conference was organized by Konsthall C, the Advanced Course in Decolonizing Architecture at Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and CEMFOR (Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Racism) at Uppsala University. The north is not only a geographical expression — it often also indicates a power relation based on a presumption of superiority. Despite violent border regimes and colonial processes on indigenous populations, northern European countries have scarcely dealt with their own self-image of colonial powers. Is decolonization today a possible political project of liberation against this historical prejudice? What is at stake and how should we position ourselves within an imperative process of decolonization in relation to land and knowledge? In particular, how can we de-align from the reproduction of oppressive structures and look instead to new alliances between native and migrant populations — towards solidarity practices within art, discourse and the situated locality.
Internal Colonialism and Colonial Heritage
17 April, 2018, Stockholm
This conference is organized by the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course and the Research Lab at the Royal Institute of Art (RIA), the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Konsthall C and Tensta Konsthall.
The conference presents a series of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of colonial architecture, expanding the notion of colonial space into present realities. It explores the internal colonization of Sámi land in Sweden, remittance urbanisms and new struggles of knowledge production within Europe, poses disruptive questions around the heritage of Palestinian refugee camps — the oldest refugee camps in the world — as well as confronting the colonial heritage of European museums and institutions. A second day is dedicated to guided exhibition visits to Konsthall C and Tensta Konsthall and an evening lecture by Forensic Architecture that will call for the mobilisation of architecture as both a form of research and activism.
Manifesta 12
21 June – 23 June, 2018, Palermo
As part of the 5x5x5 program of Manifesta 12 in Palermo, the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course presented a project for the critical re-use of the Casa del Mutilato — a fascist building designed by Giuseppe Spatrisano and inaugurated by Benito Mussolini in 1936. The project took the form of an architectural intervention; a prosthesis to the Casa del Mutilato which acted as a tool to reorient the future uses of the building and pragmatically started a much needed restoration process.
Seminar on the Cities of Asmara and Addis Ababa
30 August, 2018 – Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
David Rifkind, Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Peter Lang
Experimental Preservation
6 November – 9 November, 2018 – Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Erik Langdalen, Torun Hammar and Carlos Minguez Carrasco