KOOZ Thanks for making time. At the time of this conversation, I see the call for applications to join the second cohort of Reconstructions is open. I want to hear the story of how this course came about and the pedagogy you have constructed for it. What is the rock around which you built your temple?

MARIE-LOUISE RICHARDSThat's actually a good question. I think I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, even while working on the pilot version of the course. Reconstructions began as a research project, before the idea of a course at KKH — which is the institute where I teach and work. The initial contact came from publisher, researcher and designer Alice Grandoit Sutka, co-founder of Deem journal, which explores design as social practice. Alice is currently head of public discourse at re:arc institute, a philanthropic organisation supporting architectures of planetary well-being, where she works across initiatives with storytellers and educators driving and shaping socio-ecological change. To my delight, she reached out with an invitation to bring a proposal about an experimental framework for sharing knowledge. She had perhaps seen Citations, the issue of Parse journal that I co-edited with Cathryn Klasto. This led to me developing a speculative proposal, which was the framework for what Reconstructions became.

KOOZ How did you first imagine it in your proposal — was it already an educational programme?

MLR No, not really. I collected some thoughts that have been emerging in my practice. I used the time to ask myself, where would you like to go deeper? I wanted to travel a bit, to gather information and inspiration not immediately accessible to me here in Stockholm. But generally, I wanted to go deeper into these topics of black feminist practices, histories and methodologies. Reconstructions just sort of came out of that process of trying to draw things together. In the research phase of the project with re:arc, it has been so incredibly valuable to have Alice, to think alongside in this process. It is not lost on me how rare and special it is to find another person in Scandinavia whose practice and thinking are as embedded in the intersection of black feminist thought and spatial practices, as my own.

The word ‘reconstruction’ occurs a lot in black feminist writing, describing ways in which the black feminist is always reaching for other possibilities or imagining otherwise. That became the very loose framework or proposal for the project. Reconstructions also calls back to the era following the abolition of the institution of Slavery in the United States, which also informed the 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at MoMA, curated by Mabel O. Wilson amongst many others.

KOOZ So your Reconstructions was not linked to an academy or institution as yet, but rather a personal development project, right?

MLR No institution, this was before all that. I did consider that it might be fun to imagine a syllabus, but a syllabus without an institution. The space and freedom to consider a syllabus outside of any framework was very meaningful — otherwise you can get stuck in thinking through institutional constraints. Together with Alice, I visited the Venice Biennale of Art in 2022, which was a perfect start. In particular, Simone Leigh’s US pavilion was absolutely magical; some serious witchcraft going on there — you could almost touch it. The way in which the sculptures dealt with space in a very conscious way, including the classical elements in that pavilion: it was really beautiful. That charted a course for what I wanted to look at over this year of research. I also visited the Octavia Butler archive in Pasadena — engaging with her manuscripts and notebooks opened up so much. She offers such insightful, nuanced and complex ways to think about space, like no one else can.

KOOZ It occurs to me that in American history, I come across the term restitution more frequently while reconstruction, as you say, is more common in feminist practice. It is as if restitution challenges an idea of property, whereas feminist practice means to reconstruct the world.

MLR Right. I feel that reconstruction is so closely connected to abolition, it’s about abolishing a system and thinking it anew… Thank you for bringing that into focus. Really, I hold a lot of gratitude for that time to develop Reconstructions as a research project, it's been nourishing in many ways. It also led to the development of an academic programme.

KOOZ Right. How and at what point did the academic institution get involved — was that your instigation or theirs?

MLR I think it was a combination. I had already been teaching at KKH in Stockholm. The school asked me if I would like to work on developing a new part time programme and though there were some constraints, I could hardly say no — it was a chance for me to develop something of my own. That’s how Reconstructions became a part of the academic institution. The course itself started last fall, in 2023. This year, it will be a full time course with a second year module — so that people who are part of this cycle can continue their deep dive here for another year.

KOOZ That’s wonderful; congratulations to you and your students!

MLR Yes, I'm really excited for it, too. The cohort that I have this year is so amazing; if there is a possibility for them to go deeper with their brilliant selves, that would make me so happy. Also it speaks to a meaningful intention to challenge architectural thinking, maybe destabilise it or cause a bit of friction.

KOOZ Can we dig into that friction? What are the benefits of situating this discussion in architectural education?

MLR I ask myself this question constantly. When I proposed this course, it was always embedded within architecture; that was the framework. There was a question as to why it wouldn’t sit within art. Firstly, I don't feel like I can claim that space in the same way as I can claim architecture. But if we are talking about reconstruction and abolitionist work, then why is it so important to occupy or acknowledge architecture — or to recognise any institutional discipline, really?

KOOZ I think what you're getting at is a productive friction; it sounds like working within institutional limits can be instructive in terms of what you can do outside.

MLR Yes, that’s what it is: instructive. My answer is simple: I can only dig where I stand. Where I stand at the moment, and where I have been standing for some time, is within institutions. I think about it in terms of what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say in The Undercommons: it's not that we are so concerned with academia or institutions. It's just where we happen to find ourselves: we are here. This is what we know. We are just finding ways to live within this particular structure, but I guess it could have been any structure.

Then too, when I'm talking about the significance of institutions within the paradigm of Western society or whatever, I’m talking about them as these sites that we have designed as places to think, to share: it’s the mechanism for knowledge exchange.

KOOZ In terms of architecture and with a title like Reconstructions, we could almost say that it’s in the name. I think the adjacency you’ve chosen is important, whether that's because architecture as a discipline has material agency in world-building or because it is closely allied between politics, economics and culture.

MLR All of those reasons! Those are definitely some of the reasons why I have found architecture interesting enough to stay within it, and where I would like to remain for now.

KOOZ Let's talk a bit about what Reconstructions is about, in order to better understand what challenges it brings —

MLR That IS what it is about, I think. It is definitely about examining our relation to the world. What I'm most interested in, when it comes to black feminism or black feminist art, are the ways in which black feminism is always in relation to other black feminists — past and present — and how it remains as very much a collective practice in itself. It might not be ‘in relation’ in the sense of people speaking to each other in the here and now — that practice is always relating itself to something else. That interconnectedness is beautiful.

Also what I find interesting in Black Studies or in African diasporic thinking and doing are the ways of thinking about the black experiences as something that has emerged, and emerged despite being constructed as non human. For instance, despite being constructed as such, it develops a way of being in this world, the acts of maintaining and celebrating life and ways of being the face of in the face of abjection.

KOOZ Wow, that hit me like a train.

MLR I feel like Blackness maybe holds that capacity but it doesn't belong to Blackness — it belongs to anybody who has been constructed as such, right? Everybody has been constructed in some way, butI think what you can track in black culture is the way in which that knowledge has been shared through different creative practices: through writing, music, so many cultural forms. It has also been covert and fugitive at times, in order for this knowledge to be passed on. That is what I'm interested in, low key things: the spaces, the forms, the specialities of these forms of knowledge.

The scholar Katherine McKittrick wrote an essay about Sylvia Wynters’ unpublished manuscript Black Metamorphosis, which discusses waveforms. The waveform is how Wynters captures the musical practice of the Black diaspora, ranging back from slave songs to Maroon pidgin and how rhythm and drums were used to communicate — right up to current musical forms through jazz, blues and contemporary music expressions. McKittrick and also Wynter become more expansive, including all creative practices from the diaspora. So that is the idea that we organise around. We've been thinking in terms of poetics, both in language but also in aesthetics. How can we then capture other futurities, other ways of being through language? How can we form our own imaginaries and ways of thinking otherwise? That’s also the reason we started with affect or emotions: recentering the body, beginning with this refusal of separation and acknowledging our connections to each other, to other beings and to the land from which we've been separated.

I think that architecture has been a form of practice that demands domination, or at least the fixing of certain things. Architecture is involved in the project of separating, ordering, controlling and dominating how we relate, how we move and engage — while simultaneously claiming that it's neutral.

KOOZ What are you able to do within, and what are you motivated to do outside of the space of architectural academia?

MLR Perhaps the biggest challenge comes from the way that I sort of approached the notion of productivity in the academic context. We'll see how much we can push it, but I believe in it firmly. I don't ask the cohort to produce much. I ask them to show up, to be present, and to actually engage. How do we measure that? I don't know. I'm not really that invested in measuring it. That makes it very tricky in an institution, right, because we need to measure things.

So I need to come up with writing a syllabus that allows for that. Currently there's no crescendo moment, when participants should arrive at something conclusive. Again, I’m not sure how much I believe in measured credentials for this kind of study. You can only gain by actively showing up and engaging with the material; you won't be able to do anything with it unless you actually try to engage with the material, and have an active exchange with your cohort.

What I hope for them to be able to do is to show up and get something out of that process. It could be that someone found something very meaningful that Audre Lorde, observing that they will bring it into their practice and thinking. Right now is the point where the current cohort is articulating their reflections. You can articulate and reflect around these issues only if you are present and engaged. That is what the criteria is, within an academic framework.

KOOZ These reflections — are they always shared in forms of writing? Or are various formats accepted as well?

MLR Mainly it’s true that we do organise around texts, and then we reflect through those texts in conversation. The year is organised into several brackets, let’s say. We meet for one intensive week per month; there is significant time in between, but we get together with them for five days. It is quite a good rhythm to focus our time with each other every month.

So the first block has been organised around poetics. I mean that after Audre Lorde’s statement, ‘Poetry is not a luxury.’ We started thinking about the politics of refusal before leaning more firmly into the materiality of things, and thinking about black women's geography of struggle, as articulated by Kathrine McKittrick — again responding to the work of Sylvia Wynter in Demonic Grounds.

We moved towards thinking through the lens of pleasure, or the use of the body. How do we give value to the values that have been demonised? How to discover ways of being that have been nourishing in the past but perhaps demonised in our society, in the sense of countering our productivity. Right now we're getting into the next phase, which is called Experiments in Imagining Otherwise — inspired by the work of Lola Olufemi. We move on then to consider practices; to read a little bit less and engage with various forms of practice. The final bracket is, again, called Reconstructions. That's when people propose different formats that they wish to think through; they will host sessions themselves and maybe bring in guests.

KOOZ Your task as an educator sounds like a beautiful one. Maybe I can ask you about your experiences in education: what are the gaps that you might have observed?

MLR I think the biggest gap that I have started noting — through engaging with different groups of students — is in the ways in which we engage with spaces of knowledge sharing. What expectations do we bring into the room? Also, what are we demanding from that space? This can be very different depending on the body you inhabit and the experiences that have shaped you. I think non-white bodies appreciate a space for reflection that is open-ended and doesn't necessarily arrive somewhere; that idea comes from my experience of the space of whiteness. That space seems to demand answers, productivity and solutions to everything that is put on the table. It is inherently extractive. When that doesn't arrive quickly enough, frustration arises. I think what Reconstruction wants to allow is space for reflection.

Also, what I come up against as a teacher, again and again (and again) is the frustration of being asked to provide a method for decolonising architecture. I'm not going to tell you how to do that, it is ethically not something I can do. We cannot claim to provide you with those answers; we would then reproduce the very systems that we are critiquing. But we can hold the space to try to recover, to imagine, think together towards other possibilities. We need to think about time differently. If someone were able to give you that answer within a year, the world would be a different place.

KOOZ It is refreshing to hear about this pedagogical model in which productivity is neither at the centre, nor at the edge. Indeed that metric is perhaps precisely the object to dismantle.

MLR Like yourself, I think about how to counter the idea that something needs to reach a singular answer. Why can’t there be a plurality of moving forward, thinking around or circling back? The violent rejection of that does tell you something about what is accepted in the world — why something without metrics seems so dangerous that you just have to shut it down.

KOOZ Precisely, I think it also comes back to the need to sit in proximity to architecture — which is, as you say, precisely the instrument of fixing particular states of capital and denying the possibility, therefore, of other states.

MLR We have actually disconnected from alternate systems of things; so much of what you come up against daily, wants to disconnect you from what you already know. That's what I think is the biggest gift of black feminists: through their writing, through their practice and their thinking, there is this lineage of reconnecting you to the world. It’s a relief to think okay, I can stop questioning myself and keep going about my business.

KOOZ It has been the biggest gift to talk with you. You're so remarkably eloquent in talking about these transformative ideas.

MLR Thank you, that means a lot!

Bio

Marie-Louise Richards is the founder and leader of the experimental research course for further education and platform Reconstructions at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her work explores ‘black feminist spatial futures’ as embodiment, critical strategy and spatial category through methods of architectural and artistic research, curatorial practice and writing.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.