Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism – part of Co-liberation: International Lecture Series

Join the School of Architecture for the second event of the 'Co-liberation' International Lecture Series 2020–21.

Artist, filmmaker, and professor Ariella Aïsha Azoulay will be joined by David Burns in a conversation to unfold photography, archives, and museums as imperialist extractivist technologies that sustain a project of world destruction. How do we unlearn this imperial project and conjure other ways of being in the world? The conversation will be prompted by an introduction by Adrian Lahoud, Dean of the School of Architecture.

This is also the inaugural Annual Media Studies Lecture at the RCA School of Architecture.

Register free for this event and you will be sent the link to this Zoom webinar.

British Sign Language interpretation available for this lecture.

Co-Liberation: the RCA School of Architecture International Lecture Series 2020-21

‘As long as we are resisting we are free’ echoes the lingering battle-cry of the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin. For Amin, revolution was a process, a non-linear struggle forged in the long-now. This is revolution crafted in acts of resistance, in everyday opposition to an oppressive, profit-over-people logic which would seek to foreclose access, movement and imagination. This is revolution enacted through acts of freedom, through dangerous dreaming, alternative occupations and the construction of infinite, previously unthinkable possibilities in the face of enclosure. This is revolution as a home, a place of warmth, care, mutual aid, and solidarity across globally dispersed sites of interconnected struggle. This is a revolution that considers the days after the revolution as an integral part. It does not forget to think about those who will, after the revolution, as artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles reminds us, 'pick up the garbage on Monday morning'.

This year’s series of lectures – under the theme Co-Liberation – draws these acts of resistance and freedom close and into dialogue, understanding that they operate both in time and space. We know that revolution is not a one time event and ask what unspent fuel remains from previous struggles to be reignited today? What can we learn from those who are on the front lines as we seek to imagine and build a more just, equitable world and how can we engage in constructing active forms of solidarity? We offer the International Lecture Series to all those who seek the warmth of a home of revolutionary thought today: from confronting the spatial instruments of racial capitalism, the violence of gender binaries, and the settler colonial underpinnings of the urban, to emancipatory Black re-constructions of the archive, the poetic, the performative and the sonic that reach back in time, grab hold off glowing embers of liberations gone-by and bring them to the fore, ready to be set alight with the strength of our collective breath, our desire to live and live free.