Fiction Feeling Frame

RELAY is a 24-hr global conversation gathering 50+ architects, artists, activists, curators & designers towards building a collective voice: ‘How can we speak to one another? How can we speak together?’ 16-17 July, Biennale Architettura 2021 & online at relay.fff.industries

Relay is the voice beyond speech, hearing the silences, listening to the muteness of unheard voices.

After 24 hours of incredible speakers, our comrades from FFF return to wrap up this wonderful conversation now with Hashim Sarkis!

Reaching the final thoughts Huda and Hashim add the question: “beyond how do we live together, we could ask how do we listen together?”

These sounds travel through time and space, and they get their own shape and form. Beyond the dominance of vision, sound carries a valuable reflection. The movement of sound is local and attuned to space, but is also global in terms of networks and collaboration.

What does it mean to think about these spaces of muteness of enslaved people in architecture? How are these voices speaking? Which voices do we listen to and take the time to care for them?

“We can through retelling architecture present it differently. Probably the most resilient architecture is the one that is open to possibilities. Architecture can also listen and respond.” – Hashim showing how architecture is a witness of shapes, voices, histories.

“It's always a negotiation. What is at stake in these alternative histories?” – Huda unpacks the role of architectural histories and narratives, particularly looking at her latest project that reflected upon Cape Town colonial architecture and the traumas embedded in them.

Huda highlights the violence of curricula and pedagogy that are not carefully attentive to the hegemony of the Global North. The voices and hearts unlistened have a huge role in the way architecture is taught and practiced.

The voice, storytelling, the stories of these architectures not told, and the history that is not part of what we understand and see in architecture, we realise we can make space to these stories and what could be possible, including what is real and materialised.

Hashim proposes the idea of “generous listening” and question to Huda: how do we do that in architecture and make our practice more meaningful?

Looking at the complexity of the world, and quoting Donna Haraway, Huda questions “how do we stay with the trouble?”

In our final conversation, Huda Tayob and Hashim Sarkis reach the final leg of Relay and go back to the central question of the Biennale: how do we live and speak together?

Tabita and Huda wrap up this beautiful conversation, sending healing to lands, and peoples, encouraging us to carry on! And in the background, the sun appears in both places where they are. What an amazing way to start Saturday morning!

From silence to living together, Huda posed: “The act of remembering becomes more present when you lose someone” – Huda and Tabita unfold the cycle of life and birth, reminding us of the fragility of life.

Trauma and grief in times of zoom – how will we deal with the separation from one another? What is the role of silence? How do we read into those silences? Spaces of potential are told in different ways. How do we listen to these silences and sit with them?

“It's a kind of architecture that includes different voices, in different languages, being in a space together.” – Huda Tayob in her reflections upon her practice in relation to life and the world.

Huda and Tabita talk about the manifold ways architecture is part of togetherness. Architectures of the body, of our ancestors, of building things and connecting with the world.

“The mountain, the rivers are our common ancestors (…) we have more bacteria cells than human cells in our body, there is so much we don't know, teaching us about togetherness. Togetherness comes in different scales” – beautiful words from Tabita Rezaire.