Tonika Johnson: Navigating Divides and Nurturing Relationships

How do we position ourselves - as practitioners, students, community members, facilitators - in the environment in which we intervene? How do the relationships we build, build us, the world around us and the world we want to see?

For our final Public Lecture Series event of the year, the RCA School of Architecture invites you to a lecture event on social and spatial solidarity work, together with Chicago-based social justice artist Tonika Lewis Johnson, speaking in London for the first time.

In exploring her interdisciplinary practice we want to consider how we - as students, staff and as a school - can apply and expand her ideas and methods to ongoing issues of inequity, property, housing and empathy.

We will use the opportunity to forge connections and conversations between Tonika, ourselves as a College and North Kensington. The lecture is a culmination of workshops between the RCA's Kensington campus and the Trellick Tower community, setting up the conditions for future collaboration and solidarity work with the neighbourhood against racial and institutional segregation.

Tonika Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood. Her work, including that through her Folded Map Project™ and her new Inequity for Sale project, reveals injustices and inequities in real estate and land use practices, including historic preservation, and encourages us to reevaluate and create positive change.

Separation & Reparation: the RCA School of Architecture Public Lecture Series 2022-23

Co-curated by Charlotte Grace & Thomas Aquilina

Carrying the common wind of our Repossession and Co-liberation series from the past two years, the 2022–23 SoA Public Lecture Series looks to articulate*, in thought and form, the notions of Separation and Reparation.

We are all too familiar with Separation, the crucible of architecture's long exclusionary history. Now, as we seek to recover our past and reconcile our present, we look to Reparation for clarity. Akin yet distinct from Unity, from resolution, even from repair, Reparation asks us to build a world where exclusionary practices are no longer reproduced. This lecture series aims to foster a shared spatial language that can trace its contours and lay its foundations.

*Articulation itself stems from cutting or dividing, to break something down into related but distinct parts. Yet it also refers to clarification, to bring something into legibility. We must build our capacity to articulate separation and reparation in order to work in solidarity with social and spatial projects or emancipation.