130. The Faada-Adda Conversations with Mariam Issoufou Kamara (Part I)

Original Drawing by Tori Haynes

This week, Nigerien architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara joins us in a stimulating discussion about reimagining architecture and epistemologies that come from West Africa. Kamara also touches on how West African, South Asian, and other non-European can help us think out of modernity.

Timestamp Outline 

2:31    Introduction

7:41    Critique on modernism: looking at Kamara’s work, would you say in spite of everything, is there in-debted-ness to modernism?

10:45 Kamara & VP’s history at the University of Washington

15:13    “The problem of both inheriting and undoing the violence that has done by the well-intention universalism of modernism” - VP
How do you inherit and undo and move beyond the epistemic and real-worldwide architectural violence?

16:39 Working with Kamara early on: Kamara’s thesis about the concept of “Faada” and “urban loitering”

19:25 The idea of “Adda” and the connectedness of all roads leading to the West; “the negation of universalism is localism” - VP

22:02 Abstractions in architecture as terragraphic, in Plato, and moving towards nirvana

24:21 The formal vs. non-formal world; nomad camps and spatial relationships
Architecture’s several modes of space vs. nomadism’s views of space

31:10 Unlearning the self and the Jungle: we need to find new ways of being in the world, and we need to undo our thinking

35:39 What worked and what didn’t work with modernism? Is hybridity possible?

39:00 Create something more sophisticated, and take the opportunity to advance; not dumbing things down

40:29 What is our relationship to _______? Animal Gods?

43:30 “unlearning your privilege is loss”. Keeping and connecting with the history of the world and the past, place, and identity and the familiarity

51:55 “Explain yourself - where being outside the norm doesn’t require explanation”

56:13 How to be in the world? What are the relationships? How do we undo universalism? How do we learn from each other?

1:02:19 What do we call this episode?!