62: Lesley Lokko (April 2022)

I, Matthew here, the Venice Architecture Biennale opens this week, so I thought I'd replay my interview with its curator, Leslie Locca. We recorded a conversation in April of 2022, just after Locca's appointment was announced. Enjoy, and I'll be back with a new episode next week. Scaffold is supported by the Architecture Foundation, bringing new voices to the conversation about architecture in London and around the world. For more information and upcoming events, visit architecturefoundation.org.uk. I'm Matthew Blenderfield, and you're listening to Scaffold. In this episode, I speak with the teacher and novelist, Leslie Locca, who was recently named as Curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Born in Scotland and raised in Ghana, Locca has been influential in academia, where she has worked to reveal the complex relationships between architecture and racial ideology. Her teaching on scholarship is rooted firmly in Africa, where she has established not one, but two new schools of architecture. The first was the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in 2015, followed by the African Futures Institute in Accra, where she is currently based. She also founded Folia, which is a Journal of Contemporary African Architecture. So it makes sense that Leslie's profile is often framed by her relationship in teaching and organizing, and it's true that in the mainstreaming of Black Lives Matter and the increasing awareness of the need to decolonize curriculums and expand and reconsider the architectural canon, it's teachers like Leslie that we often look to for a framework on how this actually might be achieved. But there's also this other side to Leslie's work that seems at face value, totally outside the boundaries of architecture. Leslie is a prolific writer of romance novels. Since 2004, she's written 10 best-sellers, which have been translated into 15 languages. And to me, it was so interesting to talk to Leslie about her approach to writing, which is popular, entertaining, and highly accessible. But often, in this kind of Trojan Horse maneuver, brings very challenging issues of race and identity to the reader's attention. Her ability to draw on enticing and unexpected formats to handle these kinds of difficult subjects is really one of the hallmarks of Leslie's work. I reached her in early April 2022. I was in London and she was in Edinburgh, where she was at work on her next novel. So here it is, my conversation with Professor Leslie Loughgan. So I wanted to start by understanding how you entered architecture initially and then how you left it. Yeah, I mean, I should say that it was quite a long-winded approach to architecture, because I started off studying Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, didn't like it, and then left and did sociology in the US. And then it was a chance encounter with somebody actually, because I was thinking, well, you know, what does one do with a degree in sociology? And I thought, well, I might do law or child psychology, those were the two things that were floating around. And I worked in Los Angeles, I should say, illegally, actually, for some time for I was an office manager for a man whose company photocopied medical records. And one day he said to me, would I come and help him choose some countertops for a new venture? He wanted to open a chicken restaurant and a dry cleaners. And because my mother had been an art teacher, I knew how to draw, or at least I knew how to draw a perspective. And I think he must have seen me doodling or something one day and he said, oh, can you come and help me? So we went down to this place. I think it was in Long Beach, California, a warehouse. And I started doing a very quick perspective sketch for him and he said, you're mad, why do you want to study law? You should be an architect and I suddenly thought, well, yeah, why not? I didn't know any architects. And, you know, at that time, in the UK, it didn't matter that you'd done a degree before you had to go back to year one. So I applied to the Bartlett from LA and eventually got in. And I think at the time I thought I was going to learn something quite deep. You know, I was sort of fed up knowing a little bit about a lot of things. I thought architecture would teach me something really profound about one thing. And I remember Stephen Groak and David Dunster were my, the two people who interviewed me, they've both passed away since. And I think it was Stephen Groak said, if you think that you're going to leave here knowing a lot about one thing come and talk to me in five years time. And he passed away before I finished at the Bartlett, unfortunately. But actually, I think he was absolutely right. I knew less when I left than when I'd started. And I think part of that was to do with wanting intuitively to talk about questions of race and power and identity and not finding an easy space within architecture, especially then, I mean, this is probably nearly 30 years ago. And I actually left before I finished my PhD, I left in 2000 to start writing fiction. And I only finished the PhD in 2007. So for a time, I was doing both fiction and the PhD which is a bit mad. I want to understand more about this particular moment in your education, where you set out to write this book and met what sounds like a kind of barrier or lack of further inquiry or some kind of obstacle that diverted your attention towards becoming a novelist. I just want to, if you could bring us back to that particular moment, first of all, writing white papers, black marks, then the outcome of that experience and how that led you to leave the discipline temporarily. Yeah. I suppose I would say it began to occur to me probably in second year at the Bartlett, where the word culture was being thrown around a lot. And what I understood by culture, I couldn't see it reflected in what was being presented to me. So it seemed it seemed as if there was a very fixed universal understanding of culture, you know, the kind of canonical texts and the references and the precedents and so on. But I knew that I came from a place that didn't have that reference point. And I remember, I mean, it was right at the beginning of second year, maybe it was even first year sort of opening up Bannister Fletcher. Looking at the tree of architecture and realizing Africa wasn't on it. And thinking, I remember thinking to myself, it's either a deliberate omission or we don't have anything like that. But, you know, I grew up in Ghana. I mean, we did have things like that. Or we did have a kind of a building and material and a formal culture. So when I first started tentatively talking, it was actually talking about culture, not not really race. But I understood very quickly in the UK that the only way to talk about my culture would be to talk about it through the lens of race. So in Ghana, I could talk about being Ghanaian, but in the UK, I could only talk about being black. And they're not the same thing at all. There's a relationship. And so the more I sort of looked at that area, the more people were encouraging me to look at music or film or literature. And it seems as if constantly the references were trying to draw me away from architecture. And I remember somebody, archaeologist, saying something to me, maybe I was in third year, which eventually became the title, I think, of the first piece that I published, which was an archaeological term called argument from silence, which in archaeology means that you dig somewhere, but just because you don't find anything doesn't mean nothing happened. So I remember, he, and I don't remember who it was now, unfortunately, explaining to me that what you're doing in architecture is essentially an argument from silence. There is something there, but it just hasn't been found yet. And then by the time I got into diploma, he sort of the masters level at the Bartlett, I found a much easier home in a sense to explore those ideas, you know, that the diploma was was was very free. So it was the first time I realized that if something wasn't there, my work could make it manifest. But there was also quite a lot of fear is too strong a word, but I think I was quite shy in many cases to come out right and say, look, I'm black and therefore I'm doing this work about being black. There's a lot of ambivalence and I think insecurity about doing that. So it took me quite a while to find the confidence to say, you know, this is not about me personally. And I think that's the way many people read it, especially then, that you know, this is about somebody trying to tell her personal story, which, which it wasn't. And I think that's in the end why I thought, you know, it's too difficult to continuously explain why you were trying to explore something. At some point you just have to kind of get on with it. And eventually I just thought architecture is not going to be the, or it was too hard to find the space to explore freely and fiction seem to be a much more forgiving space. I mean, the reason why I'm interested in this particular moment, this kind of crossroads early on, for you is that I imagine so many young practitioners and students of architecture are right now experiencing precisely the same thing, where despite supposed advancements or progressions and the culture of architecture, there's still, I think this has been accelerated by the pandemic as well as Black Lives Matter and this real concern for equity and the discipline, that it just can't accommodate everyone, or it's just in a way, it's not a big enough house for everyone. And so I'm increasingly hearing architects and students describe ambitions to develop careers that are somehow adjacent to architecture, where they have more autonomy or control, which is in a way what you did, except at face value, becoming a novelist, seems like a very sharp, veer-away from architecture, especially the kind of novels that you decided to write. You've described them yourself as "Sex and shopping." Exactly, about sex and shopping. These are blockbuster novels. You pick up at the airport, they're romantic, they're thrilling. And I want to know more about what drew you first of all to fiction, but also this particular genre. So, there's a kind of off-the-cuff answer to that, and then there's a slightly more thoughtful answer. So I'll give you the off-the-cuff answer first, which was, it was quite a calculated decision to earn some money. And I looked around at the genres that seem most likely to earn literary fiction, unless you're as 80s maith or it's unlikely that you're going to make millions from it. But commercial fiction, it's quite possible to earn a really good living. So the first impetus was commercial. But I've always been interested in beauty and in aesthetics and in seduction, because I understood, I think, even as a student, that one way to draw people into, towards your work, was to not be afraid of beauty, to not be afraid, I think Kevin Roboton was one of the first people who said to me, "If you want to say something radical or something different, understand that seduction will also be a tool." So I was very keen, I think, even as a student, not, or for people not to see my work through the lens number one of racism. I'm very interested in race as a creative category. I mean, yes, it is political, but it's not a protest category. And I've always believed that the imagination is the most powerful tool that we have. So I was very determined to tackle those questions imaginatively, not just politically or economically or even socially. So when I started writing fiction and writing these novels, the idea of sexual attraction in the novel between protagonist, for me, was a very interesting way to understand how how we view the other, what are they kind of psychological and emotional and social and political and all of those kinds of things, forces that play because they're not unlike the same forces that are at play when we deal with space or form or material or aesthetics. So I think a lot of people assume that the novels are very, very different and actually they're not for me that it's a very similar topic. It just happens to be a different medium that you test the same kind of ideas about self and other, about here and there, about what it means to be inside and outside and all those kinds of things. So for me, it was just, I think it was just another language. And I think I've always understood architecture as very narrative driven. So the novels were not so different. You described at some point following into a rhythm in your writing where in your words, you were kind of be a B writer, a B list writer. And because it's a kind of writing that's commercially driven, even though you are dealing with these really potent and complex issues around identity and race and the way, I guess, we relate to each other and define ourselves in relation. Because it's a commercial kind of literature, you get locked into a certain pattern that in order to remain in order for your work to remain lucrative. Because it's understood by your audience in a certain way, there's a certain formula to the romance novel that you have to adhere to or your agents seem to kind of encourage you to adhere to. And even in the way the books are represented, I mean, a lot of the covers are almost identical and they feature usually a woman seemingly on vacation on a beach in a sarong. And there's often no beach on a sarong on a vacation in the novel. No, absolutely. With like a paint sunset or something. So at some point, it sounds like another barrier presented itself with this medium where in order to remain kind of creative, vessel for you, it had to change or it had to, at least for the time being stopped. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, bang on the money. Especially for my British publishers, it was such a conundrum and it's been so interesting because the novels have been translated in quite a lot of languages and there's certain markets where they've succeeded in other markets where they, I think I got one published in the United States and that was the end of it. It seems like it's doing very well in Italy. Yeah, Italy's a good market. Italy's probably be relative to the size of the market. It's probably my best market and it's kind of interesting because my editor in Italy is Bulgarian by birth but grew up in Milan. And she got it immediately. She understood what the novels were about and what they were trying to do and she understood the relationship between the subject matter and the genre. And my Italian novels are probably the only ones that I would be seen dead on a plane reading myself that the covers are. But it was also very interesting for me that in territories where class is very kind of strongly present, there was less ability to maneuver between genres because the kind of class structure is very fixed. So in the UK it was very, very firmly understood that these were commercial fiction that they had titles that were all literative, you know, lots of double S's and so on. A lot of the titles have S in them. You know, pink was supposed to sell very well and there was a very fixed view of who the reader was. And my fan mail, you know, which when I started, there was quite a lot of it tended to fall into two distinct camps. Probably 5% of the people who read the novels reached out and said, I so understand what you're trying to do. 95% of the people wrote back and said, "Oh, I love sex and shopping, love the exotic locations. Do you know that the 73 bus does not stop on the corner of X-Way? You know, people, they read you and tell you that. And I remember saying something about that to, I think it was to one of my editors at the time. And she said to me, you're just going to have to accept that there's something slightly Cassandra like about what you're saying, which is that you're clearly writing for an audience that hasn't quite caught up yet. And this was about 20 years ago. I actually really didn't understand what she meant. When I came back from Spitzer, you know, after having resigned, after Black Lives Matter, and I got in touch with my agent who's still my agent. And she said to me, now's the time, you need to write again. And it's as if the outside world is suddenly caught up. I guess that's what the person was telling me 20 years ago, but this is still not the right genre for its time. So, Spitzer, this is the City University of New York School of Architecture where you were dean from 2019 to 2020. The term was five years, but you left. About five months. For a myriad reasons, but in summary, it seemed like there was a profound lack of administrative support compounded by this kind of perfect storm of administrative stress. And the burden, I think, of handling a highly charged and racialized situation at the school as well. You said that leaving that post for you as an active self-preservation. I mean, I don't, in a way, in fact, this could be exhausting for you to recount in detail, but. It was very, very quick, and for me it was very, very. o'r i'r cyfer. O'n mynd i'n gael ei ddoddau yn ffoddorau'r cyfer, o'n mynd ar yma. Roedd yn ffoddorau'r cyfer, mae'r cyfer, o'n mynd ar yma, o'n mynd ar yma, ymgynnau, rwy'n ysgwyrddol i'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, a ffoddorau'r cyfer, Mae'n gwahfodd o'r â'r eitach yn ymwyr i'r cyflwyth. Mae'n gwahfodd o'r ac mae'r cyflwythau yn yma. Mae'n gwahfodd o'r eitach yn ymwyr i'r cyflwythau yn ymwyr i'r cyflwythau yn ymwyr i'r cyflwythau yn yma. Mae'n gwahfodd o'r amser a'r amser, maen nhw'n ydym yn y pethen. Mae'n gwahfodd o'r amser, mae'n gwahfodd o'r amser, mae'n gwahfodd o'r amser, mae'n gwahfodd o'r amser. yn sicr Hunterwood, takar. s Renau ac. Mae ac rhagodd yr unwdeg纳 felly ef eug Gedan y N향wi'r apoi hynny gydiеловod? Ond dphy malch sef ing oedd g Rob Lorffówy. lliod y byddwn lid ybl fel dyliobín magic ar y yr EFire. Mae'r ein gweld er Sefer Traghwyl discardi mwnod ywedd dw. Yr holl us to callol rhèan dar shakeno. Ond lŷagol cydevo ond yn cael llawer however wrth petit cefyniddoedri gor tiers childish𝘦ir concealed? Mwyr gweithio bod ychydwch yn ffyrddio. Mae'n ffyrddio'r iawn sy'n ffyrddio, ac yn yw'r gweithio yn ffyrddio'r iawn. Myn gydwch yn ffyrddio i'r cefydwch yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn yma. Mae'n ffyrddio yn ymwch yn ymwch yn ffyrddio yn rhan. Mae'n ffyrddio i'r cefydwch yn ffyrddio i'r cefydwch yn ffyrddio. myn gwybod yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio. Mae'n ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn yna. Mae'n ffyrddio yn ffyrddio yn yna. ac un "R aggressive marn nair" an o prim "H movie" benn wedi勝 o cher i tro i'r teos ChynthOSodraeth IT! Ac mae'n byddiad yn pwedeith ydych chi wedi'r gweithio'r yng Nghymru yn ymwch ymwch ymwch yma. Yng Nghymru yn pwedeith ymwch yma. Inau ddoddau yn ddoddau yn ddoddau yn gweithio, yn ddoddau yn gweithio, rwy'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio wedi'r gweithio wedi'r gweithio, yn gweithio wedi'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio wedi'r gweithio wedi'r gweithio. Unni wrth gweldぇ engriedgen y muyn ungly desartiol snap math ei dyna sizes Bab â garadau Federationydd yn cyprدم cydorsolossus o gyfer hwn wedi f arunedd. Mae chifigie ac peth. Gabyrاد ynalon gael geneth ymar Gokuðu i gr Påch. Mae g Daisu yn wntau hyn o boxes y film could go@γάld Twine yn dsloffegithio fy majdnodfenau a'r gael hynnyu postrwythol o'r ymg a'r gael hynny. Mae gyda'r yn gael fy ngoradau frwythol o fych yn cael hynny. O'r gael hynny ymg i'r gelen o'r gael hynny. Ym gyda'r gael hynny'n gael hynny. Mae'r gael hynny. Mae'r gael hynny. Mae'r gael hynny. Mae'r gael hynny. Mae'r gael hynny. African Futures Institute, which to me is a kind of boggling ambition, regardless of where a new school would be, the fact that one could conceive of building a new school from scratch is to me overwhelming and also exciting, but mainly overwhelming. But I think also in the context of this particularly fraught moment in our culture where schools are having to rethink the way they teach. And it sounds like instead of working from within an existing institution, the impulse was for you to start from the beginning again. And I wondered if you could talk me through kind of early thoughts or conversations you've been having about how, in fact, one does this. And also talk more about why this new institute is situated in Accra, Ghana. So I mean, I'm from Accra, that's where I grew up. And I knew for quite a long time that I would probably eventually go home. So I went home in 2002, I think, when I got my first novel contract, "Bordepiece of Land Built a House," decided to stay. And I stayed for quite a long time writing. But you know, I crossed quite a difficult town to write in that the formula is that people send you a text. If they don't get you, they phone you. If they don't get you, they come to your house. And if you're not there, they wait for you. So it might have hard placed you to claw away time. I've heard you write in Edinburgh, where you know you want to start. Yeah, but I've had to run away to Edinburgh all the time to do it. I'm not wrong doing now. But the GSA, even though there was an existing master's program, I mean, this was a new venture from scratch. It was had a separate budget. It was a very new thing. And in some senses, it wasn't that complex. You start small. You are very clear about what you want to do. You invest quite a lot of time in the kind of branding of the idea. And you find money. I'm like a quite like fundraising in many ways. So the GSA was a really good pilot. And when I left Spitzer in January 2021, which is last year, I thought to myself, well, you're nearly 60 now. If you don't go home and start this now, you probably won't. And I couldn't imagine gearing up to go back into another institution. I mean, I thought you'll just go and find the same thing. So I was actually in Edinburgh and walking around one day. And I came across the Edinburgh Futures Institute, which is a new institute that's attached to the University of Edinburgh. And at the moment, it's kind of like a building site, but there are a couple of courses. And I suddenly thought I really, really liked that name. And I was clear that it wouldn't be a school only because one of the things that was really interesting about the GSA was Johannesburg had quite a small architectural community, but also not a very vibrant architectural culture. It's quite a small community. So people don't critique each other because you don't wind up sitting at a dinner party with a person that you've put holes at their project or whatever. So people are very coded about what they say about one another. And the general population, partly because of the racial divide, most architects are white, it's changing a little bit, but not much, means that there's a whole swath of the population who really have no say in architecture even though they live in and amongst it. But when we got some funding from a really generous benefactor to set up an international lecture series, I mean, that really is a game changer, I think, for the city because suddenly every Thursday, you know, there were, Ajay was coming, Björk Engels, Arravena, I mean, all of these kind of architectural figures that the students there see as much as students anywhere else. And that was very interesting for me. So when I thought, okay, we'll start something new in our cry. I thought it should have a public events program similar to what we did at the GSA. There should be a research component and there should be a school. And I never imagined the school being a big school, a graduate only school, not more than a hundred students. And the eventual idea was to have about 50% of them from Ghana, 25% from the continent of Africa and 25% international. And Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation were absolutely fantastic. I worship the ground, you know, both of their leaders walk on. And then suddenly the Biennale popped up. And it certainly wasn't on my radar. And so we pivoted away. And just sorry, just step in. You're referring to your being appointed as the Kyrasi. As the Kyrasi. 2023. Yeah. And this architecture being done. Yeah. So that happened in December last year. So I realized, you know, you can't continue preparing for an academic program with this, it's an enormous job. So what we did was pivot the AFI away from the teaching program or the beginnings of it to a research team. So I've now got ten young African or diasporic researchers who are working with me. So part of what they do is directly for the AFI and part of it is to do with the upcoming Biennale. And the idea is that when the Biennale is over in November 2023, I will probably collapse for six months and then start the academic program in August 2024. So that's the kind of trajectory. But it will always be small. And in terms of how maybe it's too early to understand yet how the program itself will be set up or how it will differentiate itself from his standard Western models. I mean, in part, it's simply to do. It sounds like with the makeup of the student body of demographics. But I imagine there are also teaching methodologies or the structure of the curriculum, the format through which it's delivered that you're deliberating on. I mean, is it too early to talk about those kinds of ideas? No, not at all. I mean, the first decision was to make it a non-validated, non-accredited program. So in some senses, it would be like a post-professional program. It is interdisciplinary in the sense that it's not only architects will be admitted to the program. And it'll run, certainly in its first five-year iteration, or as long as I'm around, like a series of, I guess you'd call them units, where there's not such a strong distinction between design, history and theory, sustainability, technology. So there really are, kind of like laboratory environments for thinking about the future of the discipline. And it's one of the things that, one of the equations that has been at the point, the back of my mind, I think probably for about 30 years, is that when I came to architecture as a student, the equation or the relationship seemed to be that as an African, as a black person, there was nothing about my culture that was of use to architecture, that somehow we were too poor or too corrupt or too chaotic or whatever the tropes were. And now after 30 years, I see this as the complete opposite. I think there's something about the condition of the African continent for one thing, but also the diaspora, which is too complex for the discipline as we see it. I'm not talking about the profession. Absolutely. I mean, this is a line of thought I've heard you present in lectures and interviews as well, that it's really the discipline itself that is impoverished. Yeah, yeah. And it is so helpful to be able to frame the problem that way. But in a sense, the struggle then is how one solves that problem by restructuring the discipline, which is what the AIFIs is setting out to do. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's exactly it. I mean, it's an opportunity to position, when I say ourselves, I mean, it's in a very, very broad way, at the kind of center of thought production, not always, you know, as the consumers of it. And to say that there is something rich and meaningful and generous in these histories and experiences and contexts that have been outside of Western canon for so long. And I've said it so many times, I sound like a broken record, but I really do see decolonization or decolonizing the curriculum as a gift. It's not a weapon. And so, for me, this addition expands, you know, the discipline as we know it, it doesn't contract it or replace it. Just on that point of decolonization, in some of your lectures, you present a video of a seminar you conducted at the GSA in Johannesburg, which was called Safe Space. Yeah. Which I've watched and in a way, it reminds me of other tactics or other, yeah, other tactics or approaches to beginning this pursuit of decolonizing the educational system by creating an opportunity for students and teachers to voice. their opinions and insights and critiques and frustrations in a context within which they know they won't be punished or penalized. And watching these seminars, which are structured in a way like a reality TV show, you hire a filmmaker to document these various sessions. And I mean, it's even to the point where you have a soundtrack and all the, all the tropes of the reality TV show where the contestants enter and leave a space and the kind of one-to-one interviews, it makes me think of your books actually in terms of how, how you find a format for embedding very difficult ideas in a way that, um, forgive me for saying this, but goes down easy. Yes, no, absolutely, I mean, you're absolutely spot on there. And I mean, because I have to say like, it's still, it's so hard to watch these conversations. I mean, I'm sure, um, in a speaking from my perspective as a white man, obviously difficult to talk about race in most contexts without putting my finger in it. But I think for anyone sitting in on those meetings or anyone watching, there's so much that would elicit a kind of cringe, depending on who's speaking and about what. It is so uncomfortable to see, but at the same time, you found this kind of vessel for these discussions that, um, that smooths it over and makes it consumable. And I think on first impression, especially an architectural audience, would see that kind of work as being, um, low brow, for example, or, um, unsophisticated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, in the same, in the same way that maybe, um, an uninitiated audience would see your novels as being. But in fact, it is so, to me, so exciting to, to think of these projects, both in terms of format and content. And I think it's the format that, to me, is so ingenious for, um, delivering, uh, content, which is very, very difficult to, to grapple with. So one other point, I just want to kind of bring into this part of the discussion is the fact that I've been listening to you talk to, uh, students and, and academics in the US. You've been there recently. You, um, were a love fellow at the Harvard Graduate School Design where you delivered a lecture last month. You also delivered a lecture at RISD and Rhode Island School Design. Um, and in these conversations, students will ask you questions. And there are questions that are very difficult for you to understand. Um, because of, I guess, the ways in which the format for discussing racism and inequality, is so different. There's a kind of, uh, paralysis, which is then masked by very complex language. Yeah, no, I mean, that in fact makes very little sense. The audience, you're so right. I mean, it's a really, I'm a really beautiful kind of, um, analysis of the situation. And I think, you know, I'll, I'll say one thing first and then, and then come back very specifically to, to the US in, in a second. But I remember in, in South Africa, at, at the GSA, there was a group of black students who, I literally couldn't understand anything they said. When they talked about their projects, it just drifted into, it was just babble. And after doing a little bit of digging, it turned out that there had been a class that those students had taken where a book was given to them. I think it's called Archi Speak. Archi Speak, yes. And I'm not sure exactly what happened in that class, but it, it seemed to me as if the book was taught as if it was not ironic. So the book is ironic. And, and in this context, I think it was taught as if it was serious. And I remember coming away from those four or five students who all were quite gifted, so angry because I thought what had happened was that they had been doubly robbed of language. And actually, there was no, at least in my, my view, there was no saving them. They'd gone so far down that path. Like, yeah, it was so convoluted. And when, when we did safe space, there was something about the extreme emotions that were being forced to the surface that managed to kind of pierce that veil, not for all of them, but for some of them. And for the first time, I think some of them managed to connect, anger, and shame and guilt and all of these kinds of emotions that are not really supposed to be present in the academy because those are the things that you leave outside. And this is what I mean about it being productive. If they were able to take the emotion or the passion, whether there was anger, jealousy, rage, fear, whatever it was, and use that as the catalyst to ask questions or to stretch definitions or to pull language apart, it worked. If it remained as anger, and it came into contact with situations or briefs or projects that were all about injustice and anger, you could never get past it. It was like a double reinforcement. When I got to the states, I could see the same frustration in the students and I could hear it in their voices, but they were always what, what, corralled into doing projects that were of the same anger that they were trying to grapple with. So again, they just wound up in this double bind where the more they investigated, the angrier they got, the less able they were to work, the angrier they got. And there's a very difficult way, I think, of talking about a race and class and power in the US, which, remember, careful how I say this, there's an aspect to it which is un-American. It is un-patriotic to talk about one's own context in that way. And for many African-American or diasporic students, if you reveal that anger, it's like you leave them with nothing. It's like you're saying, not only are you angry at belonging here, but if you really investigate that anger, there will be nowhere else to belong to. So there's a kind of fear attached to it because you want to write yourself both out and into the same history, the whole, the same experiences that you're discussing. So it's very complex. And I've found that using a vessel, whether that's the reality TV show or the sex and shopping novel or the thing that's not like the thing that you're trying to do, it's not exactly a Trojan horse, but it is a vessel that will carry. It'll carry the emotion that must come to the surface. I think, you said it already. So now that we're on this topic of vessels in a format, I want to talk about the culture of architecture exhibitions. So as listeners will know, you've been appointed as the curator for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. And you're under, I will say, Strict and Bargo to discuss any details around your involvement in it. And I won't venture into that at all, but I do want to talk about the culture of exhibitions more broadly. In relation to, first of all, the fact that the exhibition is itself a kind of vessel for producing and disseminating knowledge. There's also a format to the exhibition that we're all quite familiar with, which I think recently, a curator has been able to subvert more effectively. But I want to understand your attitude towards the exhibition, broadly speaking, as it relates to a particular phenomena that you've often articulated in the talks you've given. And this is the phenomena of the double consciousness. So I don't think you reference W. E. B. Du Bois directly when you talk about the double consciousness, but I mean, it's an effect, this experience of always looking at oneself through the eyes of a racist white society. And I think in your use of this idea of double consciousness, it's that pressure of the designer or the architect to explore a world in all its depth. At the same time, you're trying to explain it. And so I just want to read, there's a passage from a novel by the South African novelist, James Quetzy. Can you remind me sorry what the novel is called? I'm missing it from my nose. Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello. I just want to read it out because I feel like it very succinctly articulates this experience of double consciousness that you're describing. And of course, you've referenced it. as well. So the English novel is written in the first place by English people, four English people. And that is what makes it the English novel. The Russian novel is written by Russians, for Russians. But the African novel is not written by Africans, for Africans. African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they seem to be glancing over their shoulders the whole time they write at the foreigners who read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers. To me, this is such a lucid description of the conundrum that a lot of African and diasporic architects and designers also face. And we could look to, let's say, the serpentine, for example, you have someone like Jack Engels who is liberated to perform all these formal investigations with new materials. Whereas recently, for example, with Francis Carey or touch Anna Bilbel, the onus seems to be more on interpreting one's cultural background and representing it to a Western audience. And I don't know to what degree that decision is subconscious or how willingly designers like Carey or Bilbel generate those kind of pavilions. Carey, I think, was referencing a tree in the sense of community that formed around it in his hometown in Burkina, Faso, Bilbao is referencing in her pavilion the domestic Mexican architecture and this kind of breeze black construction. So you can see this kind of interpretation taking place through installations like that. Where it's the foreign architect, in this case, representing their culture back to a Western audience. And I just wonder what your thoughts are on that conundrum and what do you are some possible ways around or out of that struggle. In a way, this is the question you pose, and I just want to put it again out there. The question is, how can you explore a world in all its depth at the same time as you explain it? So I think, and maybe this goes back to what I was saying about the poverty in the discipline and not the poverty in the context. I think that the conventional tools of architectural representation, the drawing, the manifesto, the film, the photograph, they can only do so much in the service of that. I call it a translation as well as a kind of double consciousness because not only are you aware of being looked at, but you somehow have to do something without awareness and that awareness seeps into your work, it seeps into the way what you think, the way you make, etc. But rather than see it as, or I think I've chosen now, rather than see it as only a problem that I somehow have to overcome, I prefer now to see it as a tactic and I've spoken about this recently, maybe in the last two or three years, where I see many of the tools that I've been taught, less as tools and more as tactics. And the byproduct of the result of constantly thinking tactically is that you become quite strategic. I find that, you know, I'm not a management consultant and I certainly didn't, I didn't sign up for leadership roles, but I can also see how the experiences I've had have made it almost impossible to do anything other than lead in some senses. So there's been some, I guess, yeah, there's been a kind of expanding or a widening of my own skill set, is the way I could call it. And that comes with responsibilities and challenges and drawbacks on all the rest of it, but it really is an amazing gift, I think. And about, I don't know, three or four months ago, the AFI and Accra, we have a one of the lecture series is called the Pan-African speaker series. And we had Isadia Batte, who's from our neighboring country in Côte d'Ivoire, and he came over to give a talk. And at some point in the talk, he said, you know, I've recently come to understand that I'm no longer the future. And in a way, I feel very much like that, that I'm no longer the future, but that expanded toolset, an expanded feel that I have operated in most of my life, has given me something that's of use to the generation that's coming behind, which is why I think no matter what, no matter how I end up earning my living, I think I'm first and foremost a teacher. I mean, that's or a pedagogy, whatever you want to say. So there is something about this very neat bringing back a full circle in a way. It's as if the right tools and the right tactics have combined in the right place to do the right thing. So for that, I can only be really appreciative, I think. And you know, there is, I can't remember the phrase, it is a woman-watched man and men-watched women watching them or something like that. I mean, it's a little bit similar to double consciousness, but it's this idea that you are always aware of yourself as an object as the same time you're a subject. And that ability to look front and back, and side and side, and up and down kind of simultaneously, you know, for an architect is a gift. It's a really, it's a really unique way, I think, of seeing the world. And I could see it very, very clearly in in my South African students, particularly Black students, that the genius of the school, and it certainly wasn't mine, it was in those young tutors, you know, the samayas, the seras, the hudatai, obs, the theresh govendas, the people who started teaching very, very quickly after graduating. The moment they were able to articulate a brief for a student, in a way such that the knowledge, the experience that that student had that was different from white or middle class or suburban or whatever you want to call it students, that was the moment that the playing field was leveled because suddenly the white students could see that there was something in what the Black students were saying that came directly out of their lived experiences that they would have to learn, they would have to learn how to do. In the same way that Black students for so long had been looking at what white students were doing, and it's not to do with race per se, this is much more to do with class and kind of culture. They had to learn that. The minute there was a a reflexive two-way learning, that's when the game opened I think. Yeah. I just want to ask one more question before I let you go, and it's again to do with this culture of exhibition, which thinking more about it, has its roots in the culture of the world's fairer to what I'm thinking of the crystal palette, and how that that endeavor became a kind of cabinet of exotic curiosity. I think that's what I'm getting at when I talk about the way that-- Exhibition, yeah. Yeah, African and diaspora architects now maybe face some pressure whether it's subconscious or over it to present our culture as yet another exotic curiosity. And I wonder without speaking directly about the Biennale, if we can talk about in more concrete terms, it turns how one goes about dismantling this Western system of representation, which frames foreignness or otherness in a way that reinforces arguably the dominance of Western culture or reinforces a certain idea of whiteness. This mantles that and kind of reassembles it into a new form. Yeah. This, of course, in relation to an idea or a quote from the the theorist Bellhooks that's been circulated widely, which is that one cannot dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. So tell me more about these other tools, these new tools which will help you reform the exhibition culture. And I think also, as I'm saying this, I'm just realizing the unimaginable weight. I'm also just placing as if one curator alone can begin to do that. That's not how it works at all. In a way, it's that old conundrum that you can't be outside of history whilst critiquing it, you're inside it, you're inside the thing all the time. And I mean, I can't actually say too much about the tools of the world. the exhibition because it'll be giving a bit of a game away. But I will say this, which is something we put onto our Instagram page this morning. We have a research project going on called Pinpoint. And one of the images that we're working with is, you can probably read it, you can probably go and look it up, the African Futures Institute on Instagram. But there's an image with a James Baldwin quote, which I think says something like, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. And I think that's very much where I see this phase of, let's call it decolonisation, which is that no single event, no single exhibition, no single book person is going to flip this entirely. But what all of those things do cumulatively is switch the dial, just a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And I really do think that change happens both incrementally and then suddenly very rapidly. I mean, if I'm to look back over the past 30 years, I would say that is exactly how this has happened. And often you are too close to the event to be able to see it historically. And I suspect that's probably going to be true of many events like new exhibitions, not just the Biennale. But in five or ten years time, I think we may be able to look back and see that that was the point at which a pivot did turn. And I think for me, the relationship between carbon and colony is such an interesting one. And it's no surprise in a sense that the pandemic and the protests happened simultaneously or almost simultaneously. And the kind of increasing anxiety about climate change. But also the increasing threat of global stability. This is a real watershed moment in lots of different ways. I think an exhibition at this time in some ways will have to speak to those conditions for it to have resonance. I think there's a wonderful quote, one of my favourite writers, Dean Gordamer, and it's about the relationship between relevance and commitment. And the artist or in the widest possible sense of the word is always working between these two impulses. And it's the pulse that goes back and forth between an artist and the society. Does this have relevance? And do I have the commitment to put it in to bring it into being? Leslie, thank you so much for your time. It was so pleasure. You could have a great question. It was really enjoyable. Even listening to scaffold, I'm Matthew Blunderfield and I produce this show. The theme music is composed and performed by Luke Blair. Subscribe to scaffold on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at scaffold_podcast. If you like this show, spread the word and leave a rating on iTunes while you're at it. Thanks to Leslie Loco, special thanks to Sweet to Nana, B.M.O. or Fusu and Ellis Woodman, this is IWACEYSKANDLE THEN and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]