Sophia Lindahl - Both/And Collective Exhibition

The Both/And Collective, a group of undergraduate and graduate architecture students at Tulane University, created and installed an exhibition entitled "My Home is in the Delta: Swamps, Architecture, and Liberatory Ecologies" in the spring of 2024. From exhibition description:

"'My Home is in the Delta' examines discarded and unused sites such as garrets and swamplands as the homes of refusal, resistance, and creative tactics of social reorganization. The spaces are studied as "liberatory ecologies" and examined through a set of lenses developed in Black studies, Critical Race Theory, feminist technoscience theory, and Black Queer and Trans studies. In asking questions around exclusion and belonging, the exhibition asks what role imagination plays in the practice and discipline of architecture -- an imagination that pressures the field to contend with its past and nurture a radical practice of imagination where it might unhinge itself from systems of oppression in the immediate present."

Above: book covers from course readings

The exhibition content aimed to take a second look at the typical archive: are there new ways to interpret archival material? What is deemed worth keeping? How can we see these materials with a "nonbinary analytic" of both/and?

Each member of the collective took on a different subject for investigation. This component of the exhibition focused on the life and work of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, and investigated the role of the garden in her poetry and life. This research examines gardens and nature as both something controlled by colonial legacies of control and extraction, and a place for resistance and joy.

The AIA New Orleans gallery space hosted the exhibition and opening celebration on May 2, 2024. The opening encouraged critical conversations about architectural theory and its role in the School of Architecutre.