2023 | Exhibition | October 20 - December 3 | Parque das Águas (Estufa)
Based on the building material Tabby - cement made from oysters - the exhibition presents studies carried out on the history and preservation of the material and its relationship to diasporas around the world.
The exhibition proposes an approach to tabby preservation based on its connection to reuse and its subversion of cycles of capital by the enslaved and indigenous peoples associated with its labor. By archiving everyday practices involving oysters and tabby, we transforms how we orient larger tactics of environmental and material resilience towards the stories and labor of marginalized peoples. In this context, material preservation becomes both a social and physical endeavor through the context of the American South and the shore becomes a place where processes of land, water, and people meet.
This iteration of the exhibit has an emphasis on Portugal's colonial past and preservation networks. The project includes the creation of a website, The Global Register of Black and Indigenous Histories (GRBIH) that will serve as a map-archive of material stories of diasporic communities. The GRBIH is an on-going, open-source platform for data collection on cross-cultural architectural and spatial forms.
The platform launched at the Porto Design Biennale 2023, and Portugal serves as our first site for engagement. As a visitor to this website, we ask you to enter and preserve historical networks from your memories, photos, videos, and experiences. You can catalog the places you have been, grew up in, or wish to go, whose architecture and materials speak to each other, These networks showcase the diasporic power of materials and people through architecture and design.
This exhibition was a satellite exhibition for the 2023 Porto Design Biennale: Being Water.
www.grbih.org
2022 | Exhibition | April 22 - May 18 | MIT Keller Gallery 7-408 | Collaborators: Meriam Soltan and Aradalan SadeghiKivi
On the occasion of its anniversary issue, Thresholds 50: The Exhibition invites readers to join the editorial team of Thresholds 50: Before | After to look backwards and forwards at pasts, futures, and present possibilities. Featuring new research, creative interventions by contributors past and present, and the republication of past articles, the exhibition brings together voices and perspectives from across Thresholds’ thirty-year history.
The exhibition seeks to complicate the implied linearity of the phrase “before and after,” turning to the medium of the journal itself as a site of layered, spontaneous, multidirectional, and reflective encounters, which are never quite complete or resolved even at the moment of printing and publication. By turning the history of the journal inside out and engaging the text with readers and visitors, the exhibit seeks to “rewrite” key moments in time through the shared perspectives and experiences of new audiences.
Curated by Jola Idowu MArch ’23, Ardalan SadeghiKivi MArch ’23, and Meriam Soltan SMArchS AKPIA ’22.
The exhibition was supported by the Department of Architecture at MIT, the Graham Foundation, and the Council for the Arts at MIT. Additional funding and support was provided by Tom Beischer PhD ’04, Jorge-Otero Pailos PhD ’02, and Anonymous, and patrons Mark and Elaine Beck, Robert F. Drum, Gail Fenske, Nancy Stieber, and Nader Tehrani.
Special thanks to the Keller Gallery exhibition team: Amanda Moore, Aidan Flynn, Nanase Shirokawa, Daisy Ziyan Zhang, and Jim Harrington.
Photo Credit: Daisy Zhang
2020 | Screening and Talk | September 18
The screening and talk of Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash (1991) was presented as part of the Fall 2020 Cinema and Architectural Imagination at MIT Department of Architecture. The series was organized by Eli Keller. The film was curated by Jola Idowu, and the discussion moderated by Jola Idowu and Eli Keller.
2018 | Film Screenings | January 8 - Febuary 26
This series was presented by Doc Films, the oldest student film society in the country and curated by Jola Idowu. Films presented in the series include: Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, Space is the Place, Children of Men, Blade, Brother from Another Planet, and An Oversimplification of Her Beauty.
This series was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at The University of Chicago.
2016 | Film Screenings | September 28 - November 30
This series was presented by Doc Films, the oldest student film society in the country and curated by Jola Idowu. Films presented in the series include: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Volver, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, Broken Embraces, and The Skin I Live In.