Learning from planetary ecologies. Lecture by Peg Rawes

Lecture by Peg Rawes (The Bartlett, UCL)

Abstract of lecture:
_{As critical race scholarship shows, the structural colonialisms of modern environmental architecture are now being ‘unearthed’. This paper hopes to contribute to these new ecological histories by considering the social, racial and planetary relationships which construct the Map Paintings (1967-71) of the Guyanan painter, Frank Bowling. Bowling's black aesthetics are rooted in the routes (cf. Gilroy) of the Black Atlantic between three continents – Latin America, Europe and North America – constituting a transatlantic history of racial capitalism: paintings which offer an important body of work through which to learn-from histories of race and colonialism. Paintings, such as, Barticaborn 1 (1967) and Middle Passage (1970) reflect his post-war migration from his birthplace in Bartica, Guyana, to London in 1953, and then from London to New York, in 1966. A third painting, My Guyana (1966-67), figures his mother, a powerful local shopkeeper and seamstress, seated in front of her successful ‘Bowling’s Variety Store’ on Main Street, Bartica. Exhibited at the Whitney in 1971, as one of a series of solo exhibitions of black artists, these paintings were considered abstract, rather than environmental. Thus, as a white British environmental architectural researcher working in the UK, with its present-day racist treatment of migrant communities, learning from such ‘earth-works’ means that reparative ecological histories of race and colonialism must then also speak of one’s own historicity.}

Biography of Dr. Peg Rawes:
_{He's Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Director of Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. Her research and teaching focus on ecological, material, political and technological relations in architecture. She is the author of Space Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and Towards Deleuze (2008) and Irigaray for Architects (2007), and the anthologies, Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity (ed., 2013) and Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (lead-ed., 2016), which publish architectural, artistic, humanities, social-science and medical research on social and environmental justice for disadvantaged groups. Her forthcoming monograph Planetary Relations addresses these concerns through an interdisciplinary decolonial and climate-health lens. She was UCL PI for the Horizon-2020 Doctoral Training Grant, TACK Communities of Tacit Knowledge in Architecture (2019-23). Examples of her chapters and articles include: ‘Dex Stories: Living-with, working-with vulnerability’ (Care: Gta Papers 2022), ‘Visualising uncertainty and vulnerability’ (Materia Arquitectura 2020), ‘Aesthetic geometries of life’ (Textual Practices 2019), ‘Insecure predictions’ (e-Flux 2018), and the AHRC-funded, 'Housing biopolitics and care' (2017), and film, Equal By Design (2016).}

Event coordinated by prof. Camillo Boano and prof. Richard Lee Peragine

Event co-sponsored by:

• Ph.D. programme in Architecture. History and Project DASP PhD
• Ph.D. programme in Urban and Regional Development URD PhD

• richard.peragine@polito.it

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