Event Description:
The Black in Design conference, organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union, recognizes the contributions of the African diaspora to the design fields and promotes discourse around the agency of the design professions to address and dismantle the institutional barriers faced by our communities. The fourth biannual conference, Black Matter, will take place virtually on October 8-10, 2021.
Black Matter celebrates the cultivation of Black design and creativity from the magical to the mundane. The conference aims to lift up Black spatial practices and experiences that operate below the surface of design discourse, bringing nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledging the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora.
This year’s conference will host discussions, exhibitions, and performances at the intersections of technology, history, and design, with focus on encouraging new design practices. Black Matter offers a dynamic virtual environment where geographically distant participants are connected synchronously to share their ideas and creative work, forming a global constellation of Black consciousness.
Speakers:
Moderator: Wandy Pascoal is an artist and architectural designer who is interested in the ways housing design and policy come together to shape global urban landscapes. This inquiry led to her current role as the Housing Innovation Design Fellow, a position co-hosted by the City of Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab and the Boston Society for Architecture. In this work she strives to center the many voices of Boston’s residents and their complex experiences in order to drive the design and implementation of the city’s current and future housing models. Wandy holds a BFA in Architecture from UMass Amherst and a Master of Architecture from MassArt where she focused on the urban and housing design of a self-sustaining eco-village in her home country of Angola. Previously, she worked as an architectural designer at Stull & Lee, Inc focused on affordable housing projects in the New England area.
Jamila Moore Pewu, is a public and digital historian whose work explores how and why groups and individuals reimagine the spaces around them to create new urban futures. She is particularly interested in examining the concept of reimagining through the unique historical, geographic and methodological perspectives posed by African Diasporic and or Black Atlantic communities both past and present. As Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and New Media in History at California State University, Fullerton, Dr. Moore Pewu leads the history department’s digital humanities initiatives.
Michael Uwemedimo is a current Loeb Fellow at the GSD, cofounder and director of the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform, and senior visiting research fellow at King’s College London. As a founding member of the filmmaking collaboration Vision Machine and a producer of the Academy Award-nominated, BAFTA-winning documentary, The Act of Killing, he has been developing innovative approaches to documentary practice as a means of enabling critical reflection on histories of political violence and challenges to official impunity. Michael is cofounder and project director of the Human City Project, a community-driven media, architecture, planning, and human rights initiative in Nigeria. There he explores design processes through which violently marginalized urban communities might gain a greater measure of control over their representation and the shaping of their cities. Michael has curated major programs at the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, Architecture Association, and Institute for Contemporary Art, London; sat on international film festival juries; and presented his research and work internationally.
Jordan Weber, current Loeb Fellow at the GSD, is a Des Moines-based regenerative land sculptor and environmental activist who works at the cross section of social justice and environmental racism. Most recently, Jordan was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to create an urban farm in North Minneapolis called Prototype for poetry vs. rhetoric (deep roots), which acts as a counter tactic to industrial violence upon biodiverse lands and racially diverse communities. The project was produced in collaboration with North Minneapolis community members during the height of the George Floyd protests in late May 2020. He is currently in residence at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity and Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Jordan’s two-year project residency centers on social and environmental justice, incarceration, and healing, with a specific focus on the Close the Workhouse campaign—a collaborative project that is dedicated to the closure of St. Louis’ Medium Security Institute, known locally as the Workhouse.
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