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