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Tania Sengupta and Stuart King eds., "Reclaiming Colonial Architecture" (Routledge, 2024)
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Tanya Samgupta
Hi, this is Zoe Deutsch and Nick Robinson.
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Tanya Samgupta
So good, so good, so good.
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Stuart King
welcome to the
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Matthew Wells
New Books Network hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Wells, one of your hosts, and today I'm delighted to be speaking with Tanya Samgupta and Stuart King about their new book, Reclaiming Colonial Architecture, published by rba Publishing in 2024. Reclaiming colonial architecture explores the built inheritance of colonialism, considers how architects, heritage practitioners, students, communities and activists might narrate, care for, transform, or challenge them today. And it does this. The book does this by drawing on a variety of authors to combine historical context with thematically organized case studies across multiple urban and architectural scales. And the book recently won the Colvin Medal, the prestigious Colvin Medal from the SAHGBA in 2025. Tanya Stuart, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. I wondered if we could start off
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Stuart King
by
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Matthew Wells
you telling us, Tanya, you telling us how you came to put together this book?
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Tanya Samgupta
Yes. So we were approached by the RIBA to develop something about on colonial architecture and obviously this came up in the context of George Floyd and all the discussions and the debates unfolding around the legacies of colonialism and decolonization, and institutions were obviously trying to contend with their own legacies and past. And so that's the context in which RIBA was asking us to think about a project like this and we then actually kind of shaped it quite a bit our own way. And we can talk about that further down the line. And I think one of the key issues on our minds was the fact that we are sort of surrounded by the material legacies of colonialism. Whether it's buildings, cities, landscapes, artifacts, and these sort of circulator. There's this really quite a heavy, as well as extremely pervasive material presence, but also a whole range of immaterial and sort of intangible aspects of them that circulate around us. So how do we contend with that today? And what can designers of various practitioners from different fields. And we actually defined practice in a pretty wide ranging way. How do we respond to this? What would be a critique in this context? And how do we actually do something towards. Towards changing and towards future looking orientation? So that is how we were kind of coming to that. And we were also both, you know, we came at it. We are both historians of colonial architecture in very different contexts. I work on South Asia. Stuart mainly works on Australia. And we sort of. We met about 15 years back at a conference and have remained sort of in very much in connection ever since. And this seemed to be a project around which we could come together and work together. And then we also. It's not like we did exactly what Riba wanted us to do. The project. We really. Over a year, the project really got developed and kind of deepened. And we really thought about what is it that we can bring to the table with this book. But our key question was that what we knew in our minds was that this is a project about the present. We are both historians and we were definitely. It's grounded in this quite a rigorous historical understanding of the complexity. But it was about something in the moment or something about the present and the now.
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Matthew Wells
That's really interesting, Tanya. I wonder then, building on from that and how the shape of the book changed as you developed and how you pushed back against the publisher a little. Stuart, I wonder if you could tell us about the authors and the people who contributed to the book. How did you find them? How did you organize it into a narrative? Did you have a big bunch of people at the beginning you wanted to work with?
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Stuart King
Yeah, look. Thanks, Matt. One of the very first decisions that Tanya and I made about this book was that it needed to be an edited volume that we wanted to talk about the complexities of how people are managing. The material culture of colonialism, and that we needed to give space for people to tell those experiences and those stories. So that was an initial decision that we made up front, then it was probably quite a long process in some regards, of trying to work out there were limits on the book in terms of. We wanted it to be about case studies. So we wanted a book which is about learning from examples. And what was also important to us was that within the context of a lot of debate, we were really interested in how these issues were playing out on the ground in. In various projects. So that was really important. So then it was this long process of trying to identify the locations, the projects and the contributors. And so we were working across a series of themes that we wanted to pick up within the volume. We wanted a broad global spread of projects that could take in a variety of different colonial experiences. And then what we wanted were contributors who had some kind of close connection to those projects. And those connections vary. Some of them are designers, some of them are people within communities and so forth. And so it was this constant process, if you like, of trying to work across those different issues.
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Tanya Samgupta
Yeah. And we were also quite keen on, for instance, a whole range of types of responses. So to figure that range was also the other consideration. So we have, for instance, architectural design projects to curatorial projects, critical history, because we define practice as, you know, in quite an inclusive manner and in a wide ranging fashion. So we have people who've worked on pedagogies, people who worked on community projects or. And even everyday practices or things like memory work and people writing on personal memorabilia and doing autoethnography. So these different modes of engaging with this question and to represent that and to kind of figure that in the book was also a key consideration.
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Matthew Wells
I normally ask at this point, you know, who are the main actors in these stories? When I interview, you know, architectural historians or historians about their books, you know, who are the main actors? Are they famous architects? Are they. Sometimes they're government officials or patrons. This seems more complicated in your case, you know, because of the range of topics that the book discusses. But it doesn't sense. Architects. Sorry, Stu.
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Stuart King
Yeah, look, absolutely. I think in a way it can. We were after these kind of projects, we're after people who are involved in them. So some of the contributors are kind of well established academics who do work in this space. Some of them are designers, some of them are members within communities. So we've got that broad range of people. Some of them have come from our own networks, some of them have come from the research that we've done to try and identify projects that we feel could contribute to the overall volume as well. So it's, you know, there really is a broad range of different voices, and we felt that that variety of voice was really important in this work.
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Tanya Samgupta
Yeah. And even when we have one layer of voices is, of course, the contributors, but then they are working often with communities, or there are cases where a piece has been co authored, so between, say, an academic or a couple of academics and members of an Indigenous community, and kind of towards knowledge production or Indigenous mapping, Indigenous knowledges. So. So there are almost layers of different voices in there. And the other is also that there's a kind of a disciplinary spread of the field of practice, but also of knowledge. So, for instance, the piece that the whole book ends with is Brian Leavitis's piece on personal memorabilia. And she's an anthropologist, so, you know. So we have a whole range of kinds of voices in that sense. Yeah. And, you know, one of the points is also that we were trying to bring some clarity and legibility to a field which had already collected and it was continuing to collect a whole range of very complex discourse and debates. There was a kind of a blinding plethora of discussion, in a way, something that we hardly saw figure even 15 years back, even within architectural academia or practice, suddenly, especially with George Floyd, but also the universities asking for decolonization from much earlier and the general kind of mobilization coming from the ground that basically changed the field in a way. It became a very charged, extremely complex. So we were trying to see can we sort of present, gather and present in a somewhat clarified manner, issues which are very complex. So our choice of voices and examples were also shaped by that instinct, in a way.
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Matthew Wells
Absolutely. And with that plethora and with the voices, how then, on a kind of macro level, did you structure the book? Is it separated into different parts, or. And how is that organized?
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Stuart King
We approached this book thinking. I guess, in some regards, it came from thinking about what communities are demanding in relation to colonial pasts. And so we set up a structure which is about realms of demand. So we spent a lot of time trying to think about this, and we were looking at this very complex environment that Tanya's just described, and they began to observe that we see that there are demands, for example, in relation to land, and so land which has been occupied through colonial processes, expropriated, exploited, transformed, et cetera. And then we also see cities, which some are the product of colonial processes, and they then accrue all these different layers of colonial pasts then become subject to reappropriation. We then thought about buildings. So where we see colonial relationships embedded in kind of spaces and kind of material, fabric. And then of course, there are these things which have been extracted, collected, consumed through colonial processes. So we set up this scalar arrangement, if you like, which are realms of demand. So we're architects, we're used to thinking in terms of scale, in terms of scale of projects. That's not what this is about. These are realms of demand. It's a scalar arrangement of demands. And so what we've then tried to do is pull together projects that are a response to those demands.
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Tanya Samgupta
Yeah, and in fact, that was also another kind of interesting exercise because we had to be quite oriented to these categories that projects. There may be a building project, but if it is about a colonial material, extracted material, then it figured under things and commodities rather than buildings. So, you know, we have this project on cotton factory in India where, because it was about cotton and extraction and this new. It's a new project that was trying to rework both the production geography at a larger scale and sort of sustainable interventions at the building level, questioning colonial typologies. We were clear that that had to be placed under things rather than buildings, which we. And in a way we were kind of complicating. We were challenging some of the classic ways of understanding a building project doesn't have to sit under the category called buildings. So, you know, and Stuart, you probably have other examples in my.
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Stuart King
Well, I think there was also an acknowledgement throughout the project that in many of the cases that we're looking at, there are multiple demands at play. And so, you know, there's a certain level of intuition that's at play in how we've arranged within these categories as well.
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Tanya Samgupta
Exactly. In fact, most of the projects speak to multiple realms, but we kind of took that curatorial call to place them in different categories.
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Matthew Wells
That's very clear. Thank you. No, no, thank you for explaining that. And this kind of these four different categories and the logic of the examples within it, it's super clear and very nicely structures the book into these four parts. And I wondered if we could begin with the first kind of major part about land. Stuart and I wondered if you could walk us through a few examples of how colonial regimes used land, dispossessed people of land, reshaped these landscapes, and then how indigenous and colonized communities have reclaimed or reimagined these places more recently.
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Stuart King
Yeah, sure, I think so. Land was our first category. So it's obviously quite a. You know, it's a large category. And, you know, we begin by observing that land has been one of the really sort of profound instrumental elements of colonial and also neocolonial practices. And you know, it's related to indigenous dispossession. We have land which has expropriated, it gets converted into property through colonial processes, exploited for resources, a whole series of processes that go on in relation to land. And what this has done, of course, is to rupture colonized peoples, world making and relationships with land as well as cultural knowledges. So there are a lot of processes that are connected to the taking of land. And then we have these various projects that we were interested in that are trying to grapple with the legacies of those processes. So should I maybe take you through some of those projects? Yeah. So for example, one of the first in the book is a project in Tasmania, sort of Ireland, south of mainland Australia. It's a site called Wybalena. And Wybalena was effectively a place of concentration, if you like, following the colonial governments kind of exile of all Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples off the main island onto this site at Waibalena, located on Flinders Island. And it only operated for, I think it's less than 20 years. And it was a site of terrible violence. There was a lot of loss of life and terrible experiences there. But of course it is also a site where there are very strong connections to ancestors in that place. What has then kind of happened over the course. That was all in the 1830s and the 1840s. In the late 20th century, there was an Aboriginal lead sit in on the land. So we see a process of reclaiming that land Beginning in the 1990s, 1999, the land was returned to Aboriginal custodianship. And then more recently we have this project where the community is seeking to really ensure that the story of the place and its significance is known and shared. So there's this truth telling process and connected to that are these projects to do with rehabilitating the land, raising funds to support communities to connect with it. And so the project in the book is written by architects Matt Hines and Poppy Taylor in collaboration with the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania. And this is a part of that broader truth telling process where they're communicating the kind of history of this place as part of this process of working out her ways forward with that land.
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Tanya Samgupta
And for instance, another very extremely in a way, another piece which really speaks to our moment is for instance a piece by Meera Idris on Palestine and it's about ordinary subjects, spatial practices within more recent settler colonial landscapes, Palestinians racial practices. And this was written actually before the onset set of the war on Gaza. And she kind of sketches out Palestinian people's efforts to liberate themselves from a landscape of immense control and vigilance infrastructures and instead looking out for seeking out leisure and recreation within natural settings. So she calls it landscaping as a kind of verb and seeking this and actually trying to kind of claim space through these sorts of leisure practices she actually frames as a type of spatial intervention and critique within an extremely difficult and challenging landscape, for instance. And yeah, and we also have Huda Tayob's project, which is a pedagogy project on water infrastructures, where we had the category of land, but then we were complicating the land, water, the sort of binary divide. And her pedagogy project was oriented around that and some very interesting student work is featured.
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Stuart King
There are two projects there that are dealing with plantation landscapes in Barbados and also in the Seychelles as well. And another really interesting project by Tiffany Kay and Dang, who was talking about a pavilion near Banff in Canada designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and ultimately flooded, and she was actually talking about the possibility of demands from the natural world against processes of colonization and the ways in which they've treated land. So that was a really interesting case study as well.
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Tanya Samgupta
So to non agents and the role of non agents in taking a claim.
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Matthew Wells
Absolutely, I know, absolutely. And I was struck in all of them how they have a historical grounding. There's often primary historical sources, but they're also about understanding these things in the present setting. Current practices in multiple different ways to do with the way different communities are now engaging with these sites. I mean, I wonder if we turn to cities in terms of kind of urbanism. Tanya. I mean, you know, how seems a very obvious question, but how? I don't know if you could say a little about how colonial pasts remain embedded in cities and how we can remake these urban inheritances today.
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Tanya Samgupta
Yeah, of course. So of course the role of cities in the history of colonial and colonialism and global capitalism, sort of deep and extensive. And whether it's the formation of new port cities which altered fundamentally the political, economic and strategic geographies of colonized lands. Also the growth of colonial cities obviously always entailed capital accumulation and sort of uneven development engendered by infrastructure. Roads, railroads, canal networks geared to extract and export resources and goods. And then of course there are the sites where they were also the sites where global capitalism produced class and race based inequalities, which were then configured within city space. And then they emerge and continue to emerge in newer forms today. And of course there's also very much a line, a major line of postcolonial thought, that cities were also not purely binary. And these often involved much more complex interactions between European and native areas and peoples and therefore can't always be cast in a binary mold. So the more complex hybrid production of cities within the colonial frame and the continuing inheritances of that. And also to acknowledge that in many contexts, not everywhere, not so much in the settler colonial context, but in the non settler colonial context, these cities were co produced by locals. So therefore it's also important to see these as co produced cities and again their continued presences today and to acknowledge that and also to acknowledge the subversive and resistances and subversive agency that was also at play. So cities are obviously materially highly complex because they also often contain not a single colonial layer. Many, many quantics have been colonized several times by different colonial powers. So often it's layered and quite patchy kind of urbanism that is at play. So we have, for instance, Arunav Dasgupta's piece above New Delhi, which is basically a kind of critical spatial history of reappropriations of the city's central Vista and India Gate lawns area. And these originally colonial spaces have witnessed sort of postcolonial informal appropriation by ordinary people. Everyday use was one of the modes of reclaiming we were looking at. We kind of wanted to acknowledge and figure and also. And so there was this postcolonian moment of informal appropriation by ordinary people, but then a more recent so called recolonization by increasing securitization of public space. So that particular piece brought this kind of lead and complex spatial workings within a major central urban space. And then we also looked at not just colonies, but very much at so called former metropoles. So we were looking at London. So Shahid Saleem's 2023 project of the Ramadan Pavilion in the VNA courtyard was a very interesting example of a reclaiming of a major imperial institutional building, an urban setting, by post colonial immigrant communities. And the intervention was this sort of fun, playful, and somewhat irreverent recomposition of colonial tropes. And by reinterpreting mosque architecture within this very open public, kind of public adjacent and public courtyard. But what was also interesting was that Shahid used source material from within the museum's own collections and then kind of reworked them. So it was a kind of a. Almost like a spoof, but a project of irony, but also fun and playfulness. And finally, it was about how post colonial immigrant communities stake a claim to an urban landscape.
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Matthew Wells
And we kind of, with the pavilion, we kind of. We've arrived at the scale of a building now, and I wonder then if we might move, Stuart, to. To move from the cities to these buildings and think about how buildings are active sites in the making of colonial regimes, and then how more recently, activists and communities are rethinking and challenging the legacies of these colonial and imperial buildings.
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Stuart King
Yeah. So we approached the buildings by thinking about how they articulated sites and spaces where colonial processes were being mobilized. Of course, their construction was contingent upon land expropriation, also material extraction. They were often built using enslaved or coercive labor. Then we get a broad range of different building types that effectively become the anchors within colonial economies. And so this was how we were starting to think about some of these buildings. They play a role in establishing new systems of governance and cultural dominance. And then as we get into the detail of these buildings, of course, their sighting, their spatial orders embed hierarchies and exclusions. Again, we have processes at play where Our colonial subjects often subverted what we see in these buildings. Again, these become sites of our resistance. And in post colonial processes, we also see them being re appropriated formally and also very much informally. You know, we were also interested in buildings because of course, they directly impacted indigenous and pre colonial building forms, cultural ecological knowledges and practices. We see in some contexts indigenous dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples almost extinguishing embodied forms of building knowledge. And in other contexts, the insertion of architects and engineers as modern professionals, then marginalizing pre colonial builders and masons. So a lot of really complex processes going on within these, within buildings. They are really complex traces of colonial histories. And we see that they can be molded in all sorts of different ways. And they can also reveal narratives to wider audiences. So we have a couple of projects in the book. For example, so a project by Andrew Hersher and Anna Marie Leon in Chicago, they did an intervention at the Chicago Cultural Center, I think it was in 2019. And then this was a project about articulating all the colonial relationships embedded within the fabric of the building. There was another project written about by Michael Mossman and Andrew Leach, the Rainbow Serpent version at the Gropius Bow in Berlin. And so this was an intervention by the indigenous Australian artist designer Daniel Boyd. And so talking about the ways in which his interventions in that building speak to wider colonial histories. So we have these projects of critique in the book. We have other projects that are about informal appropriation of former colonial buildings. A great piece by Patricia Noor Mohammed, looking at late colonial housing estates in Mozambique, so in Maputo, Bira and Nampala. And so again, she's looking at the ways in which communities are then re appropriating these buildings. And of course, we also then have designers who are working in these spaces. Lemon pebble architects in Johannesburg talk about some of their projects. They are dealing with an apartheid order connected to colonialism. And they take a position that they need to be able to challenge that order in any conservation work, because not to do so would be complicit within those processes. And so they have these very interesting projects that are about a radical reordering of spaces and circulation within buildings to address those issues. And then maybe just one more project in Sydney, Australia, really interesting inner city suburb of Redfern in Sydney, a colonial post office, a piece of colonial infrastructure which is very much about the expansion of settler colonialism. But suburb of redfern since the 1960s has also been home to, in Australia, a very nationally influential Indigenous rights movement. And so when they wanted a community center. In recent years, the Redfern Post Office was a structure that could also speak to their resilience and place in that urban environment. And so then they've worked with architects, an indigenous spatial designer as well, to again start reordering that building. A really big emphasis in that work on where materials have come from in relation to country. So cultural understanding of indigenous cultural landscapes. And so again, it's all about reconnecting this urban building to country.
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Tanya Samgupta
Yeah, and there was another very interesting project that this was based almost counterintuitive, but it was based in Sicily and the piece was written by Emilio Di Stretti and Alessandro Petti and they conducted something called the Difficult Heritage Summer School in Borgorizza in Sicily. And it kind of presents one model for community based process for doing a kind of a rescripting while seeking alternative approaches to fascist colonial modernist architectural intervention. So they were working in these sort of modernist village like settings but bringing in but very much associated with the Fascist regime, but bringing in communities and how space could be used very differently. Yeah, so that was also another very interesting example.
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Stuart King
And I think we also have to acknowledge that not all of these projects are easily resolved. So one of the other case studies is around the former Appiah Courthouse in Samoa. And so this was a building that was built by German colonizers. When New Zealand seized those islands in the First World War, it became the headquarters for effectively kind of New Zealand's administration of Samoa. When Samoa gained independence, the building became a seat of government. It was later a museum. But in the early 2000s, the Samoan prime minister made a decision to demolish that building and in part to do with the colonial legacy of it. So again, then there become these questions about different forms of documentation that you can kind of retain some alternative presence of this building in those kind of ongoing discussions and discourses
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Matthew Wells
with these kind of. With the post office, with this. The courthouse and ghost structure that got proposed by a student that we see. I mean, I should say the book is also lavishly. It sounds glib, but lavishly illustrated. There's an amazing array of images for each of these examples, both historic material, but also kind of contemporary photographs of whether these are community workshops, these are intervention spaces, these are, you know, student work, pedagogical work. It's. There's an amazing amount of imagery that goes with these to build the arguments of each author. I wonder, once we're kind of inside some of these spaces, once we're inside some of these interiors and buildings. Tanya, I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about this category of things, the final section of the book, about the kind of the artworks, the objects, the archives of colonialism, even the commodities. And how are some people now, you know, working to restore, to repair, to represent these things within contemporary settings.
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Tanya Samgupta
Yes. So if land is at one end, we were not merely seeing it as scalar, but there is a scalar aspect to our structure. If land is at the sort of at one end of it. And we were looking very much at the politics of land and the claims on land, then in a way, at the other end, in the smallest, apparent, seemingly smaller scale of objects, artifacts, things was a key line of operations of colonialism. So colonialism's extractive, consumptive, and even representational processes and forms fundamentally involve the world of things. And I remember our, you know, kind of moment of. I mean, of course, we. We were always dealing with very difficult histories, but we kind of. When we thought of things, we felt, yes, I think this would really be a capacious category that will actually help us hold many of these different processes at this scale together. So, for instance, commodities, statues, objects, artifacts, archives themselves, and through to fragments of personal memorabilia, which I mentioned in some other context earlier. And these simultaneously embody and are part of its material and symbolic relationships. And one thing to keep in mind is, especially when it comes to commodities, they are not small things. I mean, they are extensive in terms of extraction. And so the land they are actually associated with very large landscapes as well. So many of these categories themselves are connected. And of course, colonialism as a form and practice of global capitalism was founded in commodities in both raw and finished form and pursuit at their pursuit at scale. So for instance, we also looked at and they are totally associated with transforming pre colonial modes of production and causally linked to excessive physical extraction, land use, change, pollution, erosion of earlier livelihoods and practices, and much of it continue in new forms today. And we see new iterations of these extractions, obviously, especially in the neoliberal global world. We also looked at things like working class communities, however, often had developed relationships with these factories and landscapes of production. And also so projects often become more complicated by. By those dimensions that people have developed. People's livelihoods are attached to that, or people have developed affective connections to these places. So some of the pieces bring out those complexities. How do you actually contend with these landscapes? And then there's of course, the whole practice of whether by force or by coercion, taking and objects and looting. And also the whole colonial practice of collecting, displaying, museum, that whole world. Then there are monuments. In fact, Stuart's piece in this section is about a colonial monument in Hobart in Tasmania. So monuments created by colonial regimes and institutions and which have obviously been monuments also include statues, but various. A whole range of different kinds of monuments which have obviously been understandably targets for anti colonial or at this moment, decolonial resistance. And we were, you know, sort of building on Martin Heidegger and Bill Brown's notion that things are objects that cease to. That things present to us as things often when they cease to serve their original or expected role. And they are therefore continuously formed and reformed through people, object relationships in particular time and place, including today. So therefore, for us, things are reactivated as they come back into intense discourse and contestation in the present day. So that's how we were looking at this whole category. And we have architecture and heritage projects, new restorative that projects which place new restorative demands upon colonial commodities and landscapes. And I mentioned this cotton factory Malka Organic Cotton Factory in India. That was a piece that I had written and. And it looks at a small scale factory building in Telangana in India. And it was designed for the NGO Malka Cotton Trust by the architect Gulag Khandwal. And it critiques and reimagines the processing methods, geographies, relationships of production and building typologies inherited from colonial cotton production. So basically they sort of contrary to the urban, the separation, the classic separation, industrial separation or production from processing and factory, they bring the processing and weaving to the cotton fields areas. They work with smaller sized cotton farms close to the farmers and production. And the whole building, right through to its design and materials, which draw on the local landscape, to detailing, which actually houses, even allows for insects and other creatures to be part of the building, are all part of this. This is quite an interesting project that charts again, the entire scale and that we kept realizing while covering all these projects under all these categories is that they often straddle many different scales. And the other interesting thing about this project was that they were not just looking back to the past, they were looking at new, modern kind of looms, how some of the sort of inherited practices or older practices can actually be reworked within today's context. And then Stuart's project. Stuart, do you want to talk about your Crowther project? William Crowther Statue Project?
- [46:21]
Stuart King
Yeah, sure. Just very briefly. So this is a colonial monument in central Hobart in Tasmania. So it's of a colonial figure.
- [46:30]
Tanya Samgupta
Just to say that Stuart wrote on this project. I called it Stuart's project.
- [46:36]
Stuart King
Yeah. So what I was interested in here was a process of contending with that monument. And so William Crowther, who was celebrated in that monument, had, you know, committed acts of violence, in particular against a Tasmanian Aboriginal man, William Laney. That was in the 1860s. But Crowther went on to become a colonial politician and hence a monument to him. And so for many Aboriginal Tasmanian people today, it is a source of pain to witness that monument. A decision was made by the Hobart City Council, as part of their reconciliation, to approach that monument, to undertake some community engagement and so forth, to work out a future. And really what came out of that process was a demand for its removal. So I was interested in the process that they underwent, which involved a whole series of installations to try and generate a social consensus around the future of the monument. But what you then have is that we are dealing with sites and objects, things that are kind of politically and emotionally charged. And then there was intervention from activists which saw the statue felled. And so just trying to think about these different realms of justice acting on these monuments and the question of how we might, how they might, and whether or not they can work generatively together.
- [48:13]
Tanya Samgupta
To quickly sort of mention that there was one piece by Neel Sashore on the Riba's Jarvis screen, which again, really problematizes the colonial legacy of the Riba and the kind of representation it involved. There was an interesting student project by Richard Adetokumbo Aina about this was a very interesting project which actually looked at what happens when you repatriate objects. There's so much of discussion on repatriation, what happens when they arrive in these former colonial lands. So he looked at these lobby lands in West Africa and actually designed what he called like a vessel for receiving these objects and including, you know, the yard where they arrived. So there's some really interesting aspects flagged in those projects. And the book ends with Bryony Widdis's very beautiful piece on this informal family archive of photographs and diaries and notes she inherited from her parents from an Irish family and problematizing and thinking back on that family's fast colonial relationships in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa. And she does this auto ethnographic inquiry and writing a type of unarchiving, which is an expression that Shakti Chhattupadha uses in talking about objects which lie hidden within the basements of museums and the question of unarchiving. Yeah, so those are some of the projects, some of the pieces that figure in our Think section.
- [50:04]
Stuart King
And for us, Bryony's piece at the end was really powerful because it is a reminder that this material culture also exists in our homes. It's part of our own past. And then how do we deal with that at a personal level? It's not just something that's out there.
- [50:21]
Matthew Wells
Yeah, exactly. One comes away from Bryney's piece completely imagining that most European, if not, you know, most people in the world might. A lot of people in the world would have these family collections. And if you just. Even if you just look obliquely at them, I mean, there's some of the photographs taken of an unnamed family in Hong Kong, for instance, and reading actually what we can perhaps think and read about that and how our relatives are and our histories, our own personal histories are connected to this is very clear and powerful, I think. I wondered if we could just finish, actually, by looking forward. And I know this is always cruel to ask authors who finished a book what the next project might be, but could you guys each give us a quick preview of your next project? What you're working on at the moment or something that's perhaps just come out.
- [51:09]
Tanya Samgupta
I also just wanted to quickly add that in terms of the overall book, we did a very substantial introduction which actually kind of lays out the field and talks about the architecture's nexus with colonialism, the fact that resistances and critique is not only happening today, that they have a long tradition, contemporary resistances, and then kind of how we arrive at our conceptual framework. So there's quite a. And that is one of, I'd say maybe our contributions to. To this field that we mentioned that is very complex and quite daunting to navigate for people. And we also have the section introduction, so there's a kind of editorial thread running right through. We have quite sort of incisive and very literally inserted section introductions for each section and then a reflective piece on practice in our conclusion. The multiple modes that practice can take. And yeah, kind of call to that. And of course your question was about what is our next project?
- [52:24]
Stuart King
Yes, yeah.
- [52:25]
Matthew Wells
No, no, no, absolutely. I wonder what. I wondered. Yeah, what you're. What you're both working on at the moment and what you might. And what come, you know, as another has a second volume come out of the project are there. You get other collaborations that are going.
- [52:39]
Stuart King
A few weeks ago I published another book with three other colleagues which I guess there are some kind of relationships in themes, but certainly not directly. And what this does is to take 100 heritage listed places in Tasmania and what we were interested in is one, kind of curating a selection of those places which is quite different to perhaps what people would normally think about and two, to think about how we narrate them to a general audience. These are narrations that do deal with contested pasts that also provides the new insights onto places that might be contested contemporarily in terms of their implications for economic development and opportunity today. So that's been kind of an interesting project. The other thing on my desk at the moment is a project with Christoph Schnorr at Unitech in New Zealand. Christoph was a contributor in Reclaiming Colonial Architecture. And we're just pulling together a collection of scholarly essays that are looking at modernism across Australia and New Zealand. So that's the big thing on my desk at the moment.
- [53:48]
Tanya Samgupta
Yes. And first of all, Stuart and I are historians of colonial in different contexts. So those. That aspect of our work has been an ongoing thread and it is continuing. And in fact it's from within that context that we working on this in the first place. And then I've been quite involved in race and architecture historically and in the present day. So race and colonialism and architecture. And so in a way this project was always located within that thread for me and we had done this curriculum called Race and Space. What is race doing in a nice field like the Built Environment that was published in 2020. It was a collective work. And then I've recently written a piece for the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture on race and built environment in Britain. And so in a way this project was already located within that context. I'm working at the moment on a project on a co authored book on an urban festival in Calcutta, but many of the themes about subaltern practices and bottom up mobilization of urban space and kind of claiming of urban space, including of very colonial aspects of colonial cities is very much I'd say those themes are very resonant and the others Stuart and I are planning to develop take forward some aspects. So we have some things in mind to actually to do more in depth work and kind of expand into some specific project which we want to definitely work on.
- [55:44]
Matthew Wells
Yes, Fantastic news. Thank you. Thank you so much for that, Betty. No, I mean we all look forward to that, both your individual work and what this future project might be. And just to remind the listeners that the prize winning Reclaiming Colonial Architecture is available from all good bookshops and probably some ill reputed ones online as well. So Tanya Stuart, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
- [56:11]
Tanya Samgupta
Thank you.
- [56:12]
Stuart King
Thanks Matt.
- [56:13]
New Books Network Outro
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- [56:55]
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- [57:22]
Tanya Samgupta
Edu Sci Fi.