This public roundtable discusses the purposes and intentions of the seminar (Anti/Post/De-)Colonial Practices cotaught by Mario Gooden, Samia Henni, Mpho Matsipa, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi at the School of Architecture. With each speaking from a specific archive, geography, and interest, the instructors expose architecture students to a critical rereading and rethinking of modern built environments and their histories and theories. Through anti/post/de-colonial practices, the four instructors and their students intend to depict the intrinsic relationships between modernity and violence, and scrutinize the possibilities for a reversal of that violence through historical and theoretical analysis and understanding. 

Torkwase Dyson, the Spring 2019 Robert Gwathmey Chair in Architecture and Art, was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent her developmental years between North Carolina and Mississippi. Traversing these regions helped her develop a fundamental sensitivity towards urban development, southern landscape, and black spatial justice.  Dyson earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and her Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Yale School of Art. In 2016 Dyson designed and built Studio South Zero (SSZ), a solar-powered mobile studio where the context of nomadicity became the framework for learning and making art about the environment. It was traveling with SSZ that inspired her experimental project The Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Liberation, where she explores contemporary theorizations of space, architecture, and the infrastructure of extraction economies.

The lecture will be moderated by Mario Gooden. 

Presented in conjunction with Dyson's solo exhibition reception I Can Drink the Distance at the 41 Cooper Gallery. 

I Can Drink the Distance, a solo exhibition by artist Torkwase Dyson, the Spring 2019 Robert Gwathmey Chair in Architecture and Art at The Cooper Union, considers how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through built environments. Attuned to the shape patterns of industry-from the history of global trade to contemporary colonization and extraction-Dyson thinks through the various ways humans oppose the violence of these synergistic systems with methods of improvisation and spatial planning.