The need for and validity of a lasting post-colonial discourse in our time is continually bolstered by the relentless ethno-territorial conflicts that surround us, affronting a terrible successor to its softer 'neo-' variant. The post-colonial condition has come to be one that continually renews itself in the face of these invasive conflicts around the world. The temporal prefix in post-colonial postpones itself recurrently and is constantly pushed to an uncertain period in the future, for some parts of the world more than others. It is but a by-product of lingering global power imbalances perpetrated by an unjust history through which the dynamic of a coloniser and the colonised—in nations, communes, and peoples— continues to be manifest. The agency of an architecture in both reinforcing these colonial and neo-colonial narratives, as well as etching post-colonial ones, isn’t amiss. It is both the weapon of the oppressor and the shield of the dissenter, either through the lens of history or as a hybrid architecture yet to come. The search for a post-colonial identity being intrinsically linked to architecture is at the heart of breaking away from the weight of colonial restitution, often reinforced by the same medium.

In navigating this tough terrain for what is vaguely defined as the Global South—once resource-rich lands bartered for a partisan view of development and modernisation—I am ruefully reminded of the 2008 exhibition, In the Desert of Modernity, organised by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in Berlin. The multifarious themes of the exhibition, extracted through decoding works of architecture and urban concepts that emerged from decades of colonial rule and the subsequent liberation movement form the subtext for the opening of the 2010 book, Colonial Modern. In laying the groundwork for what the editors would call an exploration of the relationship between "the aesthetic regime of modernism, and the project of modernisation”¹, two built structures in Berlin—the House of World Cultures itself, and the Rostlaube der Freie Universität Berlin (an allusion to the building cluster’s rusted facades) are drawn into a peripheral comparison and differentiation from a spectator point of view. While the House of World Cultures was touted to be a central modernist symbol and a showcase of the Western project of modernism manifested in architecture to the rest of the world, the university building was derided for its supposedly confusing spatial layout and trivialised in its evocation of a ‘kasbah’.² The architects' visible and vocal inspiration from Moroccan kasbahs around citadels notwithstanding, the spectators’ equation of an essentially modernist structure to a semi-urban formation typical of North African communes entirely bypassed this hybrid influence, instead denigrating it to the taint of a transcontinental influence upon the projected purity of Western modernism.

Another evocation, parallel to this denigration, is the phenomenon of the fall of modernist housing catalysed by elevated levels of migration between North Africa and Western European nations. The exodus itself was seen as a product of postwar de-escalation and the loosening of imperial grip over Northern Africa, partly reparative even. The demolition of several modernist housing blocks across the continent over the 70s and 80s—with a pointed concentration on suburban havens to house migrant populations (French banlieues, for instance)—was the unfortunate culmination of a fever pitch of unilaterally driven modernist prerogatives. While questions of 'place' are also brought under the microscope here, these intertwining narratives, coupled with the one in the previous passage, acknowledge former colonies as laboratories for Western modernism. The detritus of this architecture in both arenas, that of the coloniser as well as of the colonised, pointed to the inherent fatal flaw in the ideal of the modernistic utopia, while also uncovering the fallacy of a “ground zero” or “clean slate” architecture, refusing to draw from a resilient vernacular.

Impermanence

The kasbahs, or colloquially put, “improvised shanty towns”, had presented spatially sound urban models of settlement that have been traditionally sustainable. Vernacular knowledge and modes of existence such as these have been historically derided as rather primitive and backward in favour of the project of modernism—essentially an outsider’s perspective of development wrongly cast under a singular, global umbrella—of which hostile national takeovers were a part, enforced again through an architecture. In quite the same way, nomadism or a transient way of living is often dismissed in the same vein of primitivity and even savagery, without a bare consideration of its ethos in resourcefulness and a minimal ecological footprint, away from the meticulous planning of civilisation. These communal architectures bring to the fore how scarcity rather than abundance, impermanence as opposed to eternality, and adaptability as opposed to unchanging fixity have come to guide the search for an identity—architectural and otherwise—for roughly half the globe inflicted by an imperialist territorial acquisition. I believe the titular 'search for the postcolonial' is at the heart of the programming of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 that opened earlier this month, and has displayed remarkable maturity and awareness in just its sophomore edition at the hands of Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo. The rest of this text harps on Oshinowo’s sharp and informed curatorial note, a conjunct publication titled Field Notes on Scarcity edited by Oshinowo and Julie Cirelli, individual displays at the Triennial, the outlook of its programming, and the politics of it all. The attempt would be to form a framework that is as theoretically sound as it is rooted in real, tangible works of local practices in the global South. The ethos of Oshinowo’s spirited texts and historical underpinning of the postcolonial, I do believe, are then both aptly reflected in the subtitle for the texts presented in Colonial Modern: aesthetics of the past, rebellions for the future.

In deconstructing the many terms used in the passage above, the genesis for Oshinowo’s curatorial theme, 'Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability' becomes clearer, and in an increasingly valid and urgent context. For the development of the Triennial’s brief, the resource disparity between the roughly drawn Global South and North is not only brought under critique, it is also observed around the pivotal—but compressed for the sake of this text—moment of colonisation. A more logistical, figurative assessment of an imperialist phenomenology thus entails the understanding of the physical movement of people, capital, and resources from a region of resource scarcity to regions of abundance. The postcolonial thus lies on the other side of this temporal pincer (what we referred to as the ‘moment’ of colonisation), wherein the perspective of this movement is shifted and the direction reversed, following years—even decades and centuries—of imperial loot and plunder, often garbed under the veil of progress. An architecture produced within this tense space of the postcolonial can be then theorised to not only be a search for and a reclamation of national or cultural identity, but also as engendering a form of practice that stems from this resource disparity, from scarcity. The 'Global South', Oshinowo theorises, was built on a "culture of re-use, re-appropriation, innovation, and collaboration.”

Scarcity

The same lasting disparity manifested not just in resource distribution, but also in access to the technology that aided imperial crusades and was responsible for the extraction and dissemination of these resources. The gatekeeping of access to fair distribution systems and an accelerated industry in the Western world too were at the heart of colonial practice. In his definitive text on environmentalism entwined with colonialism and its variants in a contemporary world, Slow Violence, Rob Nixon remarked on the idea of un-imagined communities along similar lines. The notion of disadvantaged communities (native or indigenous depending on the perpetrator) that were constantly excluded from a national vision of development—imposed or inborn—has always been central to the coloniser-colonised dynamic.³ Facing violent eviction from their lands, or worse, identity dissociation, these un-imagined peoples have been at the same time essential as well as urgently dispensable in the service of the prerogative of progress, imperial as well as post-colonial. The slowness in violence is a lasting and lingering but direct effect of this un-imagination, and the very force that sunders the planet along roughly drawn lines, actively imagined in contrast. As a result, natural limitations around resource availability and later distribution propounded to greater imbalances, prompting the use of pre-industrial technical systems by the un-imagined—an industrial rooted in vernacular ingenuity as opposed to the machine. Oshinowo draws her understanding of scarcity from her search of postcolonial architectural identity and an understanding of these pre-industrial technical systems, enriched by years of local practice and ancient, traditional knowledge that she believes are key to sustainability in the face of a climate crisis. This understanding, interestingly, places her work in near direct contradiction with how the current global perspective on sustainability still heavily leans on technical innovation.

“Modernity and capitalism have created an illusion of surplus, which starkly contrasts the reality of our finite condition,” she states in one of her texts, advocating a certain frugality that is characteristic and has been definitive of architectural practices in the Global South—particularly post-colonial—in the face of exhausting resource reserves, interestingly now irrespective of their origin. "Much of our current education and practice revolves around working with abundance, but austerity has become the norm in recent years, demanding a shift in perspective to bring about systemic change”, she laments, with a pointed focus toward “business as usual” for most practices in the Global North who are only now waking up to the merits of age-old talismans of passive design and a sub-tropical version of modernism that draws heavily from context and locality. Its persistence in the practice of architecture in liberated colonies from the last century is in fact testament to its temporal longevity that couldn’t be eroded by a systematic, tabula rasa application of western modernism, for which it has often been criticised.

Adaptability

The culture of re-use and re-appropriation underlying Oshinowo’s definition of scarcity—and implied economy—in the Global South, along with her curatorial note for the Triennial also suggests a moving away from the ‘material’ in modernism, as displayed by several practices listed in her conjunct publication. “Scarcity is a condition associated with modernity that limits our thinking to the material realm,” state Abeer Seikaly, Ilze Wolff, and Heinrich Wolff of Wolff Architects, whose work found particular consonance with Oshinowo’s curation. The remark here is suggestive of a more holistic, thorough embodiment of scarcity that goes beyond materialism and what one may call a conscientious choice to be made in favour of sustainable practice. It dwells on an ethos of building practices for which the ‘material’—literal and otherwise—is simply an extension of local conditions and context, rather than a marker on a check list of points to satisfy. For her, context was nothing if not a coming together of “tectonics, social norms, and daily practices” whose interplay created the distinct but common visual identity associated with vernacularism in different parts of the world. With special emphasis that I would like to draw to the “daily practices” part, it is that ethos that has been a way of being for the Global South that Oshinowo's call to action emphasises through the projects on display at the Triennial. 

Strands

The programming of the Triennial develops along roughly three 'strands' that are extremely fluid likenesses in the projects and practices displayed at the conclave, interestingly titled Renewed Contextual, Extraction Politics, and Intangible Bodies. Each of the strands, though dealing with a different typological output in response to the Triennial’s brief, also serves as a lens to recast the epistemology of Oshinowo’s curatorial theme. The linguistics of beauty, impermanence, adaptability, and scarcity, and what they mean as emergent ideas in an architecture that is to be representative of them, are radically renewed through the strands. Renewed Contextual, as the name would suggest, looks at what context would mean laden with contemporaneity and its myriad complications, rethinking tradition, and positing "gentler versions of modernity" through championing upcycling, recycling, and reuse. Extraction Politics delves into the often tense relationship between economy, ecology, and the bureaucratic side of things through recording, documenting, and ultimately responding to the the extractive processes and practices that accompany design. It addresses the consumerist, excessive side of modern society that encroaches detrimentally on the natural environment. The third, Intangible Bodies, draws from acts of spirituality, empathy, and care to comment upon the ephemeral nature of our interaction with the natural environment. It attempts to bring decoloniality, civic status, and futurism into the realm of present world building located between the intangible and the material.

Place

The Triennial’s programming brings together exemplary practices and ideas in architecture and urbanism from Western and Southern Asia, and the whole of the African continent. There is a rooted significance in the regions represented in the Triennial. In that, these regions of resource abundance, delayed urbanism, and sparsely built upon land were also transformed into laboratories and testing grounds for Western modernism—a stamp of colonial practices enforced through architecture.⁴ There is, for all critical reasons, a strand to pull in the actual physical context of the Triennial in the city of Sharjah and for other prime urban centres in the UAE that haven’t been bereft of similar construction practices rooted in the consideration of land as a clean slate, exploitation of labour, even historical erasure to an extent, and a trade-off between an accelerated notion of development and contextual sensitivity. It is then fully to the credit of the Triennial’s curation and programming that the physicality of its displays roots itself in a part of Sharjah that lies at a certain metaphorical distance from its hyper-urban centre and other tourist travails. The Al Qasimiyah School that also serves as the Triennial’s headquarter and major exhibition spaces, for instance, is the programme’s prime site and has been renovated from an abandoned school by a local practice. The Triennial and its displays tie themselves intrinsically into the city’s local fabric through the old Al Jubail vegetable market and the Old Slaughterhouse. The market place’s distinct curved arcade, designed by a British engineering consultancy that had a major part to play in the region’s civil infrastructure, along with a square affronting it, will see six large scale displays take over entire “zones” of the disaffected vegetable market, including for workshops and film screenings in what I see as a wonderful act of urban reclamation, even if for the Triennial. A short walk away, the old slaughterhouse that lies mostly defunct in the wake of a new mechanised one—a statement likeness to industrialisation—houses displays by Cave_bureau and Adrian Pepe. The biggest surprise among host venues is indubitably the Sharjah Mall, touted to be among the largest retail structures in the Emirate, but yet incomplete. Oshinowo quotes the mall as an example of a liminal, ‘in-between’ space, now housing Limbo Accra’s display within its labyrinthine spaces.

Amongst Sharjah's esoterically numbered industrial areas that the SAT team describes as "itinerant forms of constant interaction and transaction," Industrial Area 5 bore witness to a wonderful coming together of local talent as employees pooled leftover materials to create a bird sanctuary. Oshinowo's designated zone of intervention for the Triennial is near here, adding an “ecological pause” to the “mechanised surrounding landscape”. The final site is located on the city outskirts, and dates back to 1975—the small village of Al Madam, with 12 abandoned homes and a mosque. Seen as an area of “permanent temporariness”, its inhabitation by DAAR’s concrete tent feeds this paradox in a fitting manner.

Acknowledgment

Among both of Oshinowo’s texts doubling up as quasi manifestos themselves, the word acknowledge especially caught my attention on accounts of its infrequent appearance. The need to acknowledge, first and foremost, remains paramount to tangible change. “We must acknowledge that we have been misled by the idealised narrative of machine-driven individualism and capitalism,” states Oshinowo in her introduction to Field Notes on Scarcity. In exploring Ephemeral Urbanism, Rahul Mehrotra states that it “acknowledges the need for re-examining permanent solutions as the only mode for the formulation of urban imaginaries” as part of his text ‘Impermanence as an Urban Design Strategy’ in the same book. “To move forward, we must first acknowledge that we have been misled," states Papa Omotayo in his contribution to the book, Form Scarcity and Reuse: A New Language. Acknowledgments to source; acknowledgment of receipt, of service, of payment; An acknowledgment of the first people, of the aboriginal, and of the traditional custodians of land on which civilisation flourished and freedom brandished. It is both an acceptance and a recognition that lay beyond the self, and what differentiates token gesture and meaningful practice. Could we then say that the postcolonial starts with an acknowledgment? Do we fully acknowledge a condition of post-coloniality ourselves?

References

^1.1 Marion Von Osten, Serhat Karakayali, Tom Avermaete, Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (London, 2010).
^2.Ibid.
^3.Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013).
^4.Von Osten, Karakayali, Avermaete, Colonial Modern.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)