Pratt SoA Provocations, Emanuel Admassu: Legible to Whom?

This lecture will address a series of research and design projects that are grappling with the colonial implications of architecture and urban design. Questions of sovereignty and legibility provide portals to think with the Black quotidian—spatial practices of refusal and transmutation—producing temporal moments of liberation and communality within the built environment. From the Two Markets research project to the latest installation for the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled Immeasurability; the aim is to produce a set of interventions and provocations that challenge architecture inherent commitment to borderization.

Emanuel Admassu is a founding partner, with Jen Wood, of AD—WO, an art and architecture practice based in New York City, and by extension, between Melbourne and Addis Ababa. He is also an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, and co-founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. He has previously taught at RISD Architecture and Harvard GSD.

His art, design, and teaching practices operate at the intersection of design theory, spatial justice, and contemporary African art. The work meditates on the international constellation of Afrodiasporic spaces. AD—WO’s work was featured in the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art. Their installation focuses on the immeasurability of Black spatial practices in Atlanta and the Atlantic.