Unknown, Unknown: Provisional Architectures of Memory – A Lecture by Mabel O. Wilson

At a moment when liberated citizens topple monuments erected to the power of despots and dictators abroad or when communities decide that monuments glorifying Confederate leaders, officers, and soldiers should be removed from public spaces in the U.S., what are the limits to the architectural forms and aesthetic gestures of modern commemoration? Can architecture of memorials and monuments accommodate what cannot be fully remembered or known because of the absence of evidence or what some call silences in the archives? Perhaps one way to address these absences, as the talk by Mabel O. Wilson will explore, is through different modes of provisional mark making, materialities, and sensorial experiences. These architectures of unknowing construct what geographer Katherine McKittrick imagines as a “totally different system of geographic knowledge that cannot replicate subordination precisely because it is born of and holds on to the unknowable?”

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

Organized by Pratt Undergraduate Architecture.