No Normal | Keller Easterling in Conversation with Shumi Bose

COVID-19 is an x-ray of racial injustice, inequality, and ineffectual government as well as a rehearsal for climate catastrophe. It exposes a modern mind that maintains the myth of solutions, newness, freedom, and universals. That mind gives authority to new digital technologies, econometrics, and law, to segregate and eliminate problems. COVID graphically models the productive entanglement between problems as well as forms for re-tuning and redesigning those entanglements. Interplay itself is the form—protocols of interplay that resist solutions or modular methodologies. Unfolding over time and indeterminate in order to be practical, they generate lumpy mixtures of different kinds of artifacts in space. Consider design protocols that deal with, among many other things, automation, migration, police defunding, cooperative land tenure, coastal retreat, reforestation and compounding reparations.

SPEAKERS

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. A recently published e-book essay titled Medium Design (Strelka Press, 2018) previews a forthcoming book of the same title. Medium Design inverts an emphasis on object and figure to prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems. Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure, and Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), which considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design. She was also the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking. Her MANY project, an online platform facilitating migration through an exchange of needs, was exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her research and writing on the floor comprised one of the elements in Rem Koolhaas's Elements exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale. Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934–1960. She has published web installations including: Extrastatecraft, Wildcards: a Game of Orgman and Highline: Plotting NYC. Easterling has exhibited at Henry Art Gallery, the Istanbul Design Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Rotterdam Biennale, the Queens Museum and the Architectural League. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.

Shumi Bose is a teacher, curator and editor based in London. She is a senior lecturer in history and theory of architecture at Central Saint Martins, and teaches Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art. She is also curator of exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects. Exhibitions include Freestyle: Architectural Adventures in Mass Media, a RIBA commission by Space Popular, currently on both virtual and shuttered physical display, and Conservatism, or The Long Reign of Pseudo Georgian Architecture, with Pablo Bronstein in 2017. . Shumi co-curated Home Economics at the British Pavilion, for the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016, exploring the future of the home through a series of 1:1 domestic proposals. In 2012, she was curatorial collaborator and publications editor for Sir David Chipperfield on Common Ground, the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture. Shumi has held editorial positions at Blueprint, Strelka Press, Afterall, Volume and the Architects’ Journal, and contributes to titles including PIN UP, Metropolis and Avery Review. In 2015, she co-founded the publication Real Review, currently run by Jack Self. Recent publications include Spatial Practices: Modes of Action and Engagement with the City (ed. Mel Dodd, Routledge, 2019), Home Economics (The Spaces, 2016), Places for Strangers (with mæ architects, Park Books, 2014) and Real Estates (with Fulcrum, Bedford Press, 2014).