her(e) otherwise: Bordeaux

Meriem Chabani was invited to participate in the event.

Using a call-and-response protocol, the SAAY/YAAS collective invites three female architects from Africa and the diaspora to explore a series of artifacts, language elements, and modes of representation related to architectural commissioning—the brief.

Patti Anahory, Anna Abengowe, Tuliza Sindi, and Mawena Yehouessi, curator of the project hereotherwise.space, invite Meriem Chabani, Khensani de Klerk, and Ilze Wolff to join them in a discursive research on how to position themselves in a space that is unfamiliar yet unsettling due to histories steeped in slavery and the extraction of Africans that constitute its elements.

her(e) otherwise: Bordeaux consists of two components as spaces for critical engagement. The first is an urban walk based on the Guide du Bordeaux Colonial (Syllepse, June 2020). The guide serves as the reference plan to which each participant responds and guides the course of the visit.

The exchanges during the visit, centered around the persistent colonial legacy, contemporary African presences, and bodies of water, will feed into the second public component of the proposal: a meal.

Inspired by the concept of a “kitchen table” in Black feminist work and Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1974-1979), a publicly-set three-sided table will stage a symbolic and critical elaboration on the triangular trade relationship between the Senegambia region, France, and the Caribbean.

The table constitutes a space for gathering and non-extractive sharing, acting as a framework. It also serves as the stage on which participants deploy the constellation of artifacts gathered during the “visit” in a myriad of spaces-times and a plurality of methods of localisation and belonging.

(Source: arc en rêve website)

Photography: Rodolphe Escher

Cover image: Mawena Yehouessi