Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 3
This article is the third in a three-part series. Follow the links to read part 1 and part 2.
In 2021, the Society of Architectural Historians hosted the workshop Caregiving as Method to explore the role of caregiving in architecture. It was organized by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi of Barnard College with contributions from Jay Cephas, Lilian Chee, Elis Mendoza, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Itohan Osayimwese, Peg Rawes, and the authors of this series of three articles: Kush Patel and Delia Duong Ba Wendel. These presenters, whose papers were subsequently published, were joined in three panels — one each on the topics of Care, Repair, and Method — by moderators Can Bilsel, Garnette Cadogan, and Ana Miljački. The themes and questions animating the workshop were made especially timely by the pandemic but are, in many ways, ordinary engagements with questions of survival and support in contexts of social inequality. The workshop brought forward thoughts on caregiving by scholars whose historical work has been enriched, even defined, by their empathy for, and entanglement with, the care of others.
This article, the last in a three-part series, presents a transcript, edited for clarity and length, of the conversation on “Method” that followed papers by Okoye of the University of Delaware (“Caregiving, Scholar-Parenting, and Small Works”), Rawes of University College London (“Dex Stories: Living-with, Working-with Vulnerability”), and Mendoza of Princeton University (“Tracing Humanitarian Work: Caring about the Gaps in Documenting Knowledge Production”), moderated by Bilsel of University of San Diego.
In retrospect, it is clear that the presenters in all three panels grappled most centrally with a question that Cadogan posed early on: what does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling “something” closer, or pulling others closer to you?
The dialogue that follows teases out the threads of an answer through bolded text. It is accompanied by a bibliography, compiled by the presenters, that maps sources of inspiration for the conversations. We encourage readers to engage with it and the transcript below in any order. In assembling and emboldening those perspectives, this series seeks to model an act and method of care. It offers scaffolding for a scholarly commons: a means to read and draw connections to a range of work.
Can Bilsel (CB): Over the course of three sessions, Caregiving as Method has started a new conversation about agency, vulnerability, and the anguish of writing. We have reflected on vulnerability — beyond masculinist notions of helplessness and victimhood, challenging the paternal assumption that vulnerability requires protection, refuge, humanitarian aid, or forensic analysis to administer “justice.”
Vulnerability has appeared in many forms: the researcher putting theirself at risk sharing the lives of those they are writing about — powerfully captured in a photograph of Anooradha Siddiqi at Ifo Camp in Dadaab, Kenya. To be able to write is to be admitted to a “sovereign” domestic space on equal terms. The interlocutor is acknowledged as the architect of her space, which also offers a narrative. Caregiving places the subject somewhere between, as political scientist Zeynep Gambetti frames it, “acting and suffering” — beyond the conventional historical and ethnographic models of research.
Caregiving, in both a literal and metaphoric sense, offers a new way of looking at domestic spaces. We have discussed invisible labor and the anguish inflicted on others in domestic spaces, and in academic settings where we participate in defining the conditions of employment and life of others. Then, there is the anguish of writing about someone and a space the writer is intimately familiar with. The affect of the image goes beyond the evidentiary nature of Western art historical analysis: the images we see — or that are hidden — offer something else, perhaps mourning and catharsis.
One more thought: caregiving is timely but is not confined by topicality. The projects shared here are the signposts of multi-generational and decades-long commitment to acknowledging what Ikem Okoye calls, after Elisabeth Grosz, “the possibility of a different inhabitation.” There is also reason for optimism about the future of African, Indigenous, and diasporic experiences: an approach that does not reify architecture to the spatial fixity of “buildings to be preserved” but one that, following Édouard Glissant, cherishes relations across archipelagos of the desert and the sea.
Today’s presentations reveal intimate, embodied, and tactical spaces — both individuated and collective. To continue this conversation, I will pose three questions:
Peg, how does your writing on the artist Tom Corby’s daily “affect-data” (in “Blood and Bones”) follow your earlier work critiquing the biopolitics of mapping and the image? How does the daily registry of “affect” co-opt medical data into a tactical practice that unfolds time? Is time both limited and boundless for the person living with disease and for the person giving care?
Ikem, I am curious about the way you describe “citizens of African places,” including the African diaspora, as “transient embassies,” and how contemporary art and a “transnationality” is produced and represented in these places. You note that both the rarefied “biennale art” and the diasporic vernacular occupy the two sides of the contemporary — sometimes side by side in the same city. How does your rethinking of Sokari Douglas Camp’s “whimsical, diminutive work” during your own parenting change the way you think of African diasporic art? Is the supposed distinction between whimsical and diminutive versus “public works” one we should transcend?
Elis, your paper asks how to transcend the individual career-success model and build a “community of care and solidarity.” Your questioning of the enforced “separation of academic work and praxis” is key to all of our conversations. Your project rescues Fred Cuny and his co-workers, Pedro Guiza and Jinx Parker, from the hagiography of Cuny, “The Lost American.” What were the politics of their cooperative work? When such cooperation is erased, returning solidarity to architectural histories is quite political in itself.
Peg Rawes (PR): Thank you, Can, for your thought-provoking questions. Corby’s biometric visualizations inform my practice because I live with the artist and his work. Those lived experiences challenge scientific concepts of reason and rational constructions of the world. “Care work” that tracks one’s own illness alters forms of reasoning that are embedded in architectural, philosophical, feminist, and other critical life practices. These practices constitute what we might call “passionate reasoning,” which exceeds a scientific and disembodied view of the world, life, or political imagination.
Proximity to scientific analysis, terminology, and practice is still problematic for many, particularly in feminist and Black and other critical scholarship, for the regimes of control and surveillance to which rational logics contribute. But I have found it interesting to recognize the proximity of “reasoning” in Corby's work, for example, in relation to the maps of Buckminster Fuller. In “Insecure Predictions,” I show how the ideological project of predictive visualization is a method about which architects and architectural historians need to be much more critical. Corby might call this work of embodying and translating visualizing information a distinctly other kind of “blood and bones work”: for example, during the periods he has had major cancer treatments over the last ten years, there have been times when his language and practice has been disabled to the point that he has had to rely on visual languages to collaborate. In these periods of disability, he produced a new language, provoking complex questions about control and self-determination. For people near chronic illness, one of the most distressing experiences is the loss of control and self. I am suggesting this as an example of how embodiment might offer a critical lens for the interpretation of scientific histories and visualization techniques. The linguistic alternatives and political imaginaries that Corby develops are closer to everyday life than grand narratives of architectural history, or disembodied discussions of scientific and data information.
Figure 1. A graphic representation of key concepts and dilemmas that workshop participants put forward as central to relationships between caregiving and architecture. Each thematic grouping loosely responds to moderator Garnette Cadogan’s question, “What does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling ‘something’ closer, or pulling others closer to you?” Presenters expanded the themes by collectively assembling a bibliography of related work.
Ikem Stanley Okoye (ISO): Farming, the recent film by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, a Nigerian British actor and director living in the U.S., is about the British welfare state encouraging, including through subsidies, the fostering of Black children by White, often working-class, families. Like Akinnuoye-Agbaje, sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp (the artist whom I discussed in my paper), was brought to England when she was five or six and brought up in a White family, though the similarity of their experiences ends there. What's amazing about Douglas Camp’s work is that in thinking about the diaspora question, she is very English, but also constantly insists on her Kalabari-ness. Kalabari is an ethnic group in Nigeria. And there is something striking about this insistence because it's as if she's staking a claim for the modernity and contemporaneity of ethnic identities, which is to say, standing against the idea that being modern and contemporary has to involve a dissolution of certain forms of identity that have come to be marked as “ethnic.”
I’ve brought this idea into discussion with African and Africanist curators of modern and contemporary art, and in most instances they rejected my mentions of ethnicity. I learned from these rejections through the somewhat opposite perspectives of what I call “transient embassies” that I spoke of previously. Transient embassies are communities of immigrants formed to provide support and even do things that embassies from better-resourced nations might do, like give advice on getting a passport. My experiences with them, including their tactics for occupying space — such as performing Kalabari masquerades after a meeting in a park — in order to do work among ethnicity identifying groups, evoked for me an idea from Elizabeth Grosz, “the possibility of a different inhabitation,” even though she refers primarily to queer communities. But she’s speaking generally about minority communities and the tendency for majority culture to think that it can enclose them. What she's arguing, and here I respond to Can, is that there are communities that have found a way to keep alive the very forms of being, and practices of space making and art making, that challenge the universalizing nature of what we (or curators in the biennale circuits at least) want to reimagine as modernity and contemporaneity.
In my own work, one of the things that I have learned is that the categories that separate, for instance, art from architecture, are not necessarily divisions that are recognized in the contexts that I work in. Douglas Camp was very aware of this. To do my career in relation to the caregiving responsibilities that I had, which were actually not something that one could put out in public in the late 1990s (it's increasingly more possible today, I think), I had to be cross– and multidisciplinary. That need produced a variety of kinds of work. But it's likely that I wouldn't have figured out a method in which to make that possible were it not for my encounter with these transient embassies and their ways of maintaining their cultures in a place like Chicago. My encounter in the 1980s with works by Douglas Camp, the ones she seemed to be keeping away from public view, is what ultimately led me — unconsciously, this is not something I ever theorized — to the form of practice that I still engage.
Elis Mendoza (EM): I found in Cuny something similar to what was going on with me. He enforced the separation of himself — as an aid worker and diplomat — from the people he was working with. He was coming from the military; he was used to working in communities and not grabbing the spotlight. But he understood that in practice, and in a world filled with Global South disaster specialists, he needed to become an important voice, and to claim expertise and agency for himself to navigate the politics of delivering disaster assistance. He was trying to use everything that he had at his disposal, whether that be the U.S. military or local officials. That said, he never stopped criticizing institutions, government officials, and local organizers. But once he arrived at a site, and he started working with people, a different image of Cuny emerges, one that is revealed when you interview the people that were living and working side by side with him, or who received aid, in Sarajevo, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. He would come to them and try to understand their needs, then come up with strategies with them. Then he went back to Washington, London, or Berlin and tried to repackage the whole thing as if it were coming from him because he was claiming that authority; he was the man who could make things happen. Diplomats really responded to that. He got money and aid and support from many very powerful institutions, including the Soros Foundation, because he claimed that expertise. I don't think he was very concerned with history or theory; he was a man of practice. But I don't think he would be pleased knowing that his work has been historically rendered as something he did all by himself due to his genius; that all of these people that he worked with shoulder to shoulder got lost along the way.
This story has consequences for how we look at archives, how we give more value to archives, or to written documents than interviews, oral histories, and experience. We also need to be aware of the custodianship of humanitarian institutions: what they document and preserve serves both their institutional philosophies and donor funding, making them selective archivists. When they document the work they're doing overseas, a lot of information gets lost. We no longer see the complaints or desires of people who are on the receiving end, the questions, the micro politics and fights, or the collaborations. This is what I'm trying to rescue.
I think it was Ana Maria León Crespo who said that sometimes when historians try to decolonize or look at history from a different view, they bring in figures from the Global South that are already in a position of power. At the beginning of my project, I was doing just that: bringing in the people that didn't appear in the history of Cuny. Then I realized that what I needed to bring in instead was the communal work, the cooperation in horizontal structures — not the people that were already in positions of power.
Audience member Pamela Karimi: My question is about the agency of architecture, because I am curious to know, how does this discourse of care problematize some of our old architectural theoretical tools, like Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space? Or perhaps we should remain interdisciplinary so that architecture becomes just one of the aspects of what we do? Or can we bring architecture and space more to the fore in this discussion?
PR: Pamela, thanks for your great question. The spatial and material aspects of architecture are important concerns, but what's really significant in this conversation are the questions concerning: who can be an architect? and what kind of authorship, or concept of labor, is legitimate? These are critical interrogations of the discipline and its processes of critique and innovation. For example, discussions of architectural expertise can highlight the removal, or absence, of evidence or the constitution of the scientific and “non-scientific” object. Lefebvre’s concept of space is an important Marxist intervention in the European tradition. But it lacks the specific conceptualizations of subjectivity, which feminist and critical race practitioners insist upon: political understandings of subjectivities, which are even more essential to the discipline today.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi: I want to note that everyone in this “room” works in ways that are quite affective and embodied and broadly non-visual. There is such a profound reliance on the visual within architecture. That speaks to what the scientific object is. When more of us refuse the visual as the only way to speak of architecture, it moves forward a disciplinary approach. Caregiving is a way to talk about what has been refused.
Delia Duong Ba Wendel: There's something also about the relational nature of our work; the intimacy of caregiving. That's one of the foundational things that we're all suggesting: that there is something relational to the method of knowing and understanding and the ways in which we position buildings or places. Perhaps the ways in which we're intervening in that old dichotomy, or binary, of the experience versus the archive, in writing histories, is to suggest that there's something about lived experience that's really important, that is spatial, that is material, affective, poetic. That is also a big part of the intervention here.
Citation
Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Kush Patel, “Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 3,” PLATFORM, Jan. 8, 2024.
