A collaboration between L’Internationale Online at the HDK-Valand Academy of Arts and Design in Gothenburg and the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies program at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Join the launch event online and/or with immersive installations and convivial space for informal conversations at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (Flaggmansvägen 1, 111 49 Stockholm).
The compositions, essays, videos and architectural projects in this collection explore strategies and modalities of practicing and investigating beyond the predominantly western modernist architectural canon. The European colonial/modern project constructed its identity in opposition to ‘other worlds’ labelled as traditional or backward. The suppression of alternatives was, and is, an attempt to create a singular colonial/modernist canon; hence modernity cannot exist without the disqualification and degradation of other approaches and world views.
Echoing processual music terminologies, the dissonant structures and practices outlined in this collection transform, twist and interfere with the surrounding context, with the potential to change the ideologies of the fixed urban form.
Through the approach of decolonial thinking, being and doing, one question that emerges is how to fundamentally rethink, and offer ways to reimagine, society through spatial practice—beyond the utopian universalist constraints conceived within modern architecture.
Recognising the limits and slippages of academic disciplines such as architecture, art history, museology and curating, and encouraging practices of unlearning, our task is therefore to situate a critical conversation around decolonization in Europe by challenging western epistemologies in relation to architecture, living and working spaces, territories of care, urban and rural planning.
The collection includes essays and works by Suha Hasan, Malin Heyman, Sepideh Karami, Lais Myrrha, Harun Morrison, Joar Nango, Itohan Osayimwese, Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye, Laércio Redondo, Ayedin Ronaghi, Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti. Editors: Corina Oprea, Alessandro Petti, Marie-Louise Richards, Tatiana Pinto, Roberta Burchardt.
Contact: Corina Oprea, Managing Editor L’Internationale Online, corina.oprea [at] internationaleonline.org.
L’Internationale Online is the platform for art and research of a confederation of seven modern and contemporary art institutions: MG+MSUM (Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain); MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain); Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN, Warsaw, Poland); SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands). L’Internationale is working together with complementary partners such as HDK-Valand Academy of Arts and Design in Gothenburg, Sweden and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (NCAD), Ireland.
Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies is a series of postmaster courses, public seminars, field studies, publications, and discursive exhibitions that together form a platform for education and research at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. More information here.
