pt 3: undoing, watery abundance: building collective action through food landscapes
The idea of ‘undoing’. It seems that the design profession has always been about addition and insertion. What if what a place needs is not more design, but less of it? The removal of infrastructures such as the arctic Dempster Highway, which was built and designed to serve one purpose and one purpose only - to bring labor into mining pits to extract gold. Designed infrastructures that cut through abundant lifeways, disrupting animal migrations and fragmenting habitats used for foraging, grazing, and learning.
Can we design a process of undesigning? Can we turn the term ‘design’ on itself? Using the master’s tools to one’s own advantage? In Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing and an interview with the University of Edinburgh, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o talks about how he feels that “English literature itself is imprisoned by English as a language of power and domination.. Shakespeare, for instance, was exported to the colonies, not as the writer who writes marvelous plays, but as an embodiment of Imperial British power. English literature itself came across as a literature of power.” Design is troubled by the same tensions, used as arsenal to further certain political gains, silencing other design languages and visual cultures. Can design language be shifted, reimagined, its foundations and colonial foundations shaken and challenged, to allow other design cultures to speak on equal grounds? For instance, it seems that a lot of work acknowledged as atelier Architecture are either Japanese, Scandinavian, or European in root, while other architecture is framed/dismissed as ‘vernacular’, ‘tribal’, ‘unique’, even. Two V’s. Vernacular, assigned to a lower hierarchy, is violent.
I am reminded of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s reflection on networks vs. hierarchies:
““When you crush hierarchy, and replace it with a network, then the cultures held in the different languages generate oxygen. They cross-fertilize. Cultures are able to breathe life into each other. Every culture should be taught with a nod to other cultures. Take the example of Greek mythology. It was often taught as if it was the mother of all mythologies. I think that Greek mythology should be taught comparatively with African, Norse, Scandinavian, Icelandic and Asian mythologies. They are all very exciting and it is not necessary to put them in a hierarchical relationship to each other. Let them network.”
We must shift design pedagogy and practice towards a more equitable form. Pierre Belanger’s article titled No Design on Stolen Land asked compelling questions: Whose lands are you on? Which territorial treaties are they part of? Whose stories and histories are privileged? Who are your collaborators? Are waters, rivers, estuaries, streams, seedlings, beavers, and other beings part of that change?
Pierre Belanger’s article titled No Design on Stolen Land asks compelling questions: Whose lands are you on? Which territorial treaties are they part of? Whose stories and histories are privileged? Who are your collaborators? Are waters, rivers, estuaries, streams, seedlings, beavers, and other beings part of that change?
The question of what we can bring to the place, and why we are there, resurfaces. What is the form? What visual form can our thoughts take? Initially, we were hesitant to design anything at all. Architecture felt unnecessary, since the Gwich’in have lived for millenia in cold climates and have a very thorough system of structures. Why import the methods of western practice into a totally different context here? With this in mind, we were attracted to Belanger’s idea of undesigning. To support land healing so that renewed lifeways can form and self-organize, we need to establish spatial conditions that can undo infrastructures.