Pedagogical Moments

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Pedagogy. Place. Liberation.

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D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Super Space Riff: An Ode to Octavia Butler and Mae Jamison in VIII Stanzas. Photo: Matt "Motep" Woods

D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Super Space Riff: An Ode to Octavia Butler and Mae Jamison in VIII Stanzas. Photo: Matt "Motep" Woods

D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem is an Afro-Futurist space sculptor, performance artist, designer, writer, and educator. For the last 15 years, her award-winning work has bridged the disciplines of interior design, site-specific sculpture, public art practice, and science fiction. Duyst-Akpem is the founder of Denenge Design+Studio Verto which offers specialized, holistic design services and site-specific sculpture for residential and commercial clients. 

In this guest blog, Duyst-Akpem reflects on the methodology of liberation.

As a scholar and practitioner, I utilize the teaching of Afro-Futurism as a methodology of (Black) liberation. The foundation of this is exercising the visionary and imagination muscles in sculpting new futures that affirm the present and are rooted in the past.

Afro-Futurism is more than a desire to take a ride on a spaceship—though, of course, I would welcome the chance for an orbiting spa vacation or a lunar exploration—rather, it is about possibility and learning to activate that in a concrete, effective ways. In this, the connections with Place Lab and Principle #3: Pedagogical Moments are in concert.

In my courses on Afro-Futurism, we cover a range of texts and practitioners to gain the broadest vision of this genre, beginning with Sun Ra’s iconic film Space Is The Place. Other works which address issues of place and space, of community and individual agency, include: W.E.B. DuBois’s The Comet; Paul Miller’s Rhythm Nation and Book of Ice; and Wanuri Kahiu’s award-winning short film Pumzi which presents a post-water wars settlement in what is present-day Kenya and merges environmental consciousness with representations of science, technology, archiving, and costume beyond the usual Euro-Western frame.

By centering and studying in earnest the creative representations of place and community in African Diasporic and Indigenous works, we move past ingrained Eurocentric notions of how things “should” be or how things are, and open space to imagine ourselves in the future which brings students back to the present, to their own agency as they see themselves reflected. I emphasize through the curation of the syllabus students’ ability to shape experience and movement through the world. Space becomes malleable; time can be spiral; and underground digital pathways are sites of radical re-envisioning of self and community.

Still from Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, South Africa, 2009, 23 min)

Still from Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, South Africa, 2009, 23 min)

It is about exercising that visionary muscle. I watch the development of students over the course of four months, entering the study of Afro-Futurism with careful interest, excitement, curiosity, wondering how the concepts may apply to their work. As Stevie Wonder sings in “A Seed’s A Star/Tree Medley” from the iconic Secret Life of Plants in reference to Po Tolo in Dogon cosmology, the seeds grow to sturdy young plants over the course of the semester. Students who may not have found space to express their voices or who have never been centered before find fertile ground here. I present Afro-Futurism through a lens of liberatory practice, an Africanist foundation that honors infinite ways of being; through art historical study and embodied ritual—recognizing the body as a space also that can be activated through location with location and sculptural objects—students find their own power and radiate the outward into their relationships, their communities, and their work as artists and conscious cultural producers.

This year, the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, in collaboration with Radio Imagination has hosted a monthly series of events, film screenings, and commissioned works by practitioners such as Mendi + Keith Obadike whose sound works reconfigure how we understand memory, history, space, and time. As Butler wrote her future into being, we learn to manifest our own futures, declaring as she did “So be it!  See to it!”

A hopeful and inspiring development in this vision of Afro-Futurism as a pathway and methodology of liberation was last week’s final Afro-Futurism course media presentations at School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC). Of particular interest to the Place Lab discussions, one student chose to contextualize newly elected Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx as an example of Afro-Futurism in action through her commitment to seeking justice for the disenfranchised and using her position to fight the prison industrial complex. Additionally, students also presented on the intersectional art of Juliana Huxtable as representative of Afro-Futurism’s shape-shifting qualities and on Theaster Gates’s projects that seek to reshape space and our understanding of community engagement. We had a lively discussion of Place Lab and its role in Chicago and beyond.

Recommended Reading

Rockeymoore, Mark. What is Afrofuturism?

Hairston, Andrea. Octavia Butler—Praise Song for a Prophetic Artist

Nelson, Alondra. Afrofuturism: Past-Future Visions

For further information, and please feel free to contact me at denenge@denenge.net or dakpem@saic.edu. Visit denenge.net and theAfrofuturist.tumblr.com. I’d be happy to discuss this topic and its relationship to Ethical Redevelopment further at any of our future Salons.

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Ethical Redevelopment Principle #3 - Pedagogical Moments

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Knowledge transfer and skill sharing happen in casual and formal manners.

In working with others towards a shared mission in your neighborhood, consider how to structure relationships so that the skills of one resident are utilized and others can learn from working with them. How do you create a community workshop? Who will benefit? Who will lend their skills? What types of skills will be shared? 

“Learning is not a product of school but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
— Albert Einstein

Ethical Redevelopment looks for pedagogical moments that occur when setting up a food stand, offering art instruction in unusual places, sorting through a collection of books so that a community can access it, and making an art center more functional. When budgets tighten, arts and cultural activities have long been cut out of public institutions, programs, and infrastructure. In disinvested communities, children and adults often lack opportunities for creative exploration. Local museums and centers close, performance spaces and bookstores go out of business, and public gathering spaces fall into disrepair. The contributions of artists and cultural makers are set aside as a neighborhood’s economic stability is threatened. As such, the artistic path is devalued and left unexplored.

“I think for so long, especially for African Americans, those that work in the arts or work as artists probably didn’t get a lot of encouragement 20 years ago from family about pursuing that path. So the more we can educate people that you can make a living, you can make a worthwhile contribution, that this is a road for you to travel. Yeah, it helps.”
— Michelle Boone, Commissioner, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events

PEDAGOGY IN ACTION

With a philosophy very much aligned with work being done by Theaster Gates on Chicago’s South Side, The Laundromat Project in New York City sees art as a hands-on, local agent of change in neighborhoods. Using everyday spaces like laundromats, artists set up community-based projects that directly engage with the residents in the neighborhoods of Bedford Stuyvesant, Harlem, and Hunts Point. From their website: “the skills and strategies for igniting creativity are made broadly available to everyday people and purposefully applied as tools for visioning a new and better world.” They measure success by the increase of residents’ involvement in the civic and cultural life of the neighborhood owing to a sense of belonging and investment. Recent projects include exploratory stop-animation workshops with project screenings during the Harlem Barbeque Summit, and a ice cream cart in the Latino Bronx community equipped with a pollution monitor that offers free ice cream in exchange for residents’ stories about the impact of climate change locally or their home country. These moments of exchange, sharing, and creation are vital actions in expanding the imagination of the possible and utilizing existing talent to skillshare for mutual benefit.

 

WHAT HAVE YOU SHARED?

Reflect on this past week: what’s an everyday Pedagogical Moment you’ve been a part of? Describe an opportunity you’ve had to share your knowledge base with a friend, family member, or neighbor. Tell us about it in the comments below.

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Purpose-driven development: St. Laurence project

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Former St. Laurence Elementary School in Grand Crossing. Photo: Place Lab.

What spaces exist for people to get involved in the development processes occurring around them? Who has a say in choosing what buildings will be demolished and which are allowed to remain? What happens to a community when it loses a school, and what can we collectively imagine will happen inside these unique and valuable community assets?

Inside the now abandoned St. Laurence. Photo: Place Lab.

Schools, and school buildings, are important loci of community, learning, and shared belief in the future. When school buildings and other community centers are closed, they are often simply abandoned, creating not only a visual eyesore, but a striking representation of public disinvestment and relegation of those communities. As Patrick Kerkstra observes in this Next City article on school closures: "...it’s not surprising that many shuttered schools are often simply left to rot for years by cash-stripped districts loathe to spend money on maintenance for empty buildings. It’s a state of affairs that can generate blight and, in time, pose genuine safety hazards." And it isn't just the building closure itself that impacts the neighborhood; the loss of a school sends myriad ripples throughout a community. The article goes on to note that "closing schools is almost always traumatic. Some consider the selection process arbitrary and open to political influence. And once the final decisions are made, students and families must scramble to find alternatives. Teachers are reassigned or laid off."

Because of their symbolic and practical importance to communities, renovating and re-activating these buildings presents unique opportunities for public conversation around the patterns of urban development, neglect, and reinvention, among local residents who are directly effected by these trends.

Place Lab team members Carson Poole and Nootan Bharani working on site clean-up at St. Laurence. Photo: Place Lab.

Place Lab is currently working on a demonstration project called Board Up, a community engagement series that involves communities in reimagining the possibilities of disused spaces. The first Board Up involves the vacant St. Laurence Elementary School in Greater Grand Crossing, Chicago. Concepts for the future of St. Laurence may include makerspace that provides education and job training in industrial design and fabrication that will augment neighbors’ skills and expand employment prospects.

The windows at St. Laurence prior to boarding. Photo: Place Lab.

This summer, young people in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood will engage with the reimagining of St. Laurence through artistic intervention, using the windows in the building as a canvas that will provide comment on the possibilities of St. Laurence. Drawing from the history of the community and the collections at the Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago artist Ruben Aguirre will lead a group of youth and explore pattern-making as a lens through which we can view culture and identity.  

The project will create murals for the boards that now cover the windows in the building, beginning the building’s transformation from abandoned to activated space. St. Laurence is rich with opportunities to tap into the latent capacity for change and artistry that exists among the community’s networks. These opportunities are what we call pedagogical moments, and can serve as a foundation on which a project is built. They are moments of exchange— simultaneous teaching and learning— that scale the impact of our work and move us forward. The third of our 9 Principles of Ethical Redevelopment, pedagogical moments are intentionally woven throughout the St. Laurence project and other Place Lab projects to maximize the scale and scope of impact

We'll provide updates this summer on progress at St. Laurence here on the SITE blog. Check back, and look out for an announcement for the public unveiling of the murals in August.

Windows lining a hall at St. Laurence. Photo: Place Lab.

Update: An earlier version of this blog entry referred to Place Lab's work at St. Laurence as redevelopment. The blog has been revised to clarify that Place Lab is involved in a community engagement project at the site.

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