Live Stream – Introducing 221A’s 2021 Fellows
- This event has passed.
Map from “Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution' (1971), a detailed study of an impoverished Detroit neighborhood by William Bunge, a radical geographer, peace activist, and revolutionary in the US and Canada. From DOMA’s research files.
221A invites you to meet its 2021 Fellows, DOMA (Kiev/Paris), Christina Battle (Edmonton/Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀ ᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ) and Zasha Colah (Bombay/Turin) at a livestream event, where they will each present their research projects and methodologies. While each Fellow varies in their approach and outcome, together the Fellows carry forward progressive initiatives that realign our relationships to land and territory. The nonprofit organization DOMA develops a cooperative housing digital platform which reveals how we could learn to live more in common in the city. Artist Christina Battle investigates strategies of ‘spread’ enacted by plants, fungi and digital communities, which could reshape global and local economies. And, Curator Zasha Colah And, Curator Zasha Colah is learning from disobedient territories and the ways we can preserve their bioregional integrity and the cultural heritage born from it, which has been and continues to be forcefully disappeared.
Fellows at 221A
Since 2017, 221A has worked with 11 Fellows to conduct research over periods of 3 to 24 months. Each Fellow receives a living-wage stipend to lead new research on potential social, cultural or ecological infrastructure. Staff work alongside Fellows to resource and translate research into public education, learning programs and engaging plans to develop new infrastructure.
Contributors
- Maksym Rokmaniko is an architect, designer, and entrepreneur. His research and design work explores new forms of urban living enabled by emerging technologies. He is the founder of the architectural practice Anarchitects (Kiev), a partner at The Center for Spatial Technologies (Kiev) and the project lead at DOMA (Paris/Kiev), a networked-ownership housing platform for the token economy.
- Francesco Sebregondi is a partner of DOMA, an architect and a researcher, whose work explores the intersections of violence, technology, and the urban condition. Since 2011 he is a Research Fellow at the award-winning practice Forensic Architecture, former Research Coordinator of the project (2013-2015), and co-editor of its first collective publication “Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth” (Sternberg Press, 2014). Since 2015, he’s a CHASE-funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, where his research examines the architecture of the Gaza blockade. In 2017, he was a participant in The New Normal speculative design programme at Strelka Institute in Moscow. Since 2017, he is also a Research Fellow at UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technology. Francesco’s writings have been published in journals such as the Architectural Review, Volume, Footprint, the Avery Review, or City. He has taught a design studio at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art (2013-2015). He lives and works between Paris and London.
- Christina Battle (Edmonton, amiskwacîwâskahikan ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀ ᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ, Canada) is an artist, curator and educator working within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Battle’s work focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster and the ways in which it might be utilized as a framework for social change. Much of this work extends from her recent PhD dissertation (2020) which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape, and especially to how online models might help to frame and strengthen such response.
- Zasha Colah co-founded the research collaborative blackrice in Tuensang, Nagaland (2007). She worked as a curator of modern Indian art at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai (2009-2011). She co-founded the curatorial collaborative, union of artists, and art space Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (under which she curated projects collaboratively with Sumesh Sharma from 2010-2015). Her art writing and curatorial research turn around contemporary art in Indo-Burma since the late 80s. Her latest essays on this region have been included in 'Interlaced Journeys: Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art' (eds. Patrick D Flores and Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, Osage Art Foundation, 2020) and in 'Art & Ecology' (eds. Ravi Agarwal and Latika Gupta, Marg, 2020). Her writing on the curatorial has been included in 'The New Curator' (ed. Natasha Hoare et al., Laurence King, 2016); in 'The Curatorial Conundrum' (ed. Paul O’Neill et al., MIT Press, 2016); 'Curating Under Pressure' (ed. Elke aus dem Moore, OnCurating journal 38, 2018). She curated ‘body luggage’, (Kunsthaus and steirischer herbst, Graz, 2016); ‘I love you Sugar Kane’ (ICIAO, Mauritius, 2016). She co-curated with Luca Cerizza ‘Prabhakar Pachpute’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2016), and the third Pune Biennale ‘Habit-co-habit. Artistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces’ (2017). She was part of the curatorial team under Marco Scotini of the second Yinchuan Biennale, ‘Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge’ (2018). She is co-curator with Marianne Zamecznik of a year-long public art commission for Deichmanske bibliotek, National Public Library, Oslo. She teaches comparative curatorial theory in the Master of Visual Arts & Curatorial Studies department, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan (since 2018).
Acknowledgements
Unceded Territory
221A acknowledges that the area called Vancouver is within the unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. 221A recognizes that the colony of British Columbia was created through organized dispossession and colonial violence. 221A seeks to shift its organizational practices to work together with Indigenous people to end ongoing violence, dispossession and displacement.