When invited to participate in the exhibition “Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, we deliberately focused on the architecture of SFU itself. The campus’s overall design and its individual buildings present an archive of social forces, materialized and brought into form. Following architectural scholar Eyal Weizman’s proposal that “[a]rchitecture is ‘political plastic’ – social forces slowing into form,” we also understand the built environment as simultaneously a sensor and an agent.(6) From this position, we ask: What were these spaces meant to pursue at the time they were built and what do they mean to us today?
We formed our research group Guests & Hosts (7) to explore how to unsettle the image of an institution based on settler colonial education, and how to claim a space for radical Indigenous ways of learning and knowing.
Drawing upon these questions, our work, informed by Indigenous people’s understandings of their relations to space, place, and the land, seeks to unsettle institutional spaces within and beyond the aesthetics of the iconic architecture of the buildings.
As an obvious visual act of unsettling, we turn the architecture of the radical campus upside down in a series of photographs. Flying a national flag upside down is an international signal of distress and it has also been used in the visual language of protests in Canada, such as during rallies countering the Canada 150 celebrations. The images also indicate a state of emergency, even though the photographs seem to lift up – in a playful way – the heavy weight of the settler colonial architecture. The gesture of holding up the overturned spaces of the university by Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) student Toni-Leah Yake intervenes in the oppressive placemaking of the university buildings. This gesture interrupts the reading of modernist architecture as a place solely of Western pedagogies, a still-prevalent narrative of colonial educational modernism.
From the perspectives of Guests & Hosts, the perception of the architecture, campus, and institutional fabric need to be reoriented. Instead of looking for images of the Indigenous Other, we focus on the “othering” of images – making the images of SFU’s institutional spaces otherwise.
(7) Guests & Hosts was formed by Bitter, Scudeler, and Weber, and included Métis scholar
and student Treena Chambers, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) student Toni-Leah Yake, and
research assistants Rachel Warwick and Hannah Campbell.
from: From the Kitchen Table to the Lecture Hall by Sabine Bitter, June Scudeler, Helmut Weber. Unsettling Educational Modernism
