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The Politics of Space and Belonging
Written by Malini Narayan
Portals: a reflection on our collective thought processes ignited by this zine production reimagining the city of Providence.
What does it mean to enter a new space? Are places permeable, fluid, osmotic? Do we carry traces of one space into the next, like snow that stubbornly clings to one’s boots long after the storm has passed? Or do we occupy a multiverse? A world of different worlds, in different spaces and different places, that are separate, singular?
In a world ravaged by environmental and socio-political crises, how can we share space? Do the spaces in which we coexist matter more than ever? How do we move through them, and what happens when we enter a new space?
Wherever we may wander, we find certain bodies are under attack. How can we continue to pass through different spaces while resisting the physical manifestations of their historic harms?
These are the questions that have inspired the art, culture, and peoples we engage with in our zine, Portals. As students attending Brown University, the spaces we inhabit in Providence, Rhode Island are marked by blurred boundaries and isolated environments. Our own campus sits atop Providence’s College Hill, aloof from the rest of the city. While it encroaches into the West African and Latino neighbourhoods that surround it, and was constructed through the slave trade of John Brown, on land stolen from the Narragansett tribe, rare are the exchanges with members of these communities.
Our notions of space are complicated by the fact that any entry into public spaces are actually re-entries. Others have been there before us. Rationalizing the politics of space requires a reckoning with the politics of belonging. What does it mean to enter a new space that was not built for you?
The artistic collectives we have engaged with reimagine the city in bold, brave, poetic ways. Haus of Glitter, an intersectional collective occupying slave trader Esek Hopkins’ house, a monument to white supremacy, reclaims colonial sites through healing community action. Photographer Deana Lawson’s photographs of Black bodies in the domestic realm reflect the historical movement from the African continent to the ports of New England. Renegade artist Michael Townsend’s squats public spaces with his esoteric installations. Writer and photographer Loki Olin maps the urban landscapes and structures of Providence through the lens of car culture. Community art space AS220 fosters local artists and activists and promotes programs that challenge hegemonic cultures and systems. Through these actions, the city is transformed into a site of resistance, care, healing, justice, and liberation.
How do we maintain our individual identities and freedoms while exchanging freely with others? In an interview with art critic and curator Hans Ulricht Obrist, the visionary Martiniquan writer, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant proposes a praxis of archipelagic thinking, imploring us to engage with the realities of different people and places as we wander through the world as the islands do in the Caribbean.
“[W]e need archipelagic thinking, which is one that opens, one that conforms diversity — one that is not made to obtain unity, but rather a new kind of Relation. One that trembles — physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually — because it seeks the point, that utopian point, at which all the cultures of the world, all the imaginations of the world can meet and understand each other without being dispersed or lost.”
Let us imagine a utopian community of care in which we can grow through our exchange with others, without losing or diluting our subjectivities. We seek to uncover this ultimate portal – rooted in existing spaces, but radically imagined into existence, a freedom dream for the future.
“Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” – Audre Lorde
The Politics of Space and Belonging
Written by Malini NarayanPortals: a reflection on our collective thought processes ignited by this zine production reimagining the city of Providence.
What does it mean to enter a new space? Are places permeable, fluid, osmotic? Do we carry traces of one space into the next, like snow that stubbornly clings to one’s boots long after the storm has passed? Or do we occupy a multiverse? A world of different worlds, in different spaces and different places, that are separate, singular?
In a world ravaged by environmental and socio-political crises, how can we share space? Do the spaces in which we coexist matter more than ever? How do we move through them, and what happens when we enter a new space?
Wherever we may wander, we find certain bodies are under attack. How can we continue to pass through different spaces while resisting the physical manifestations of their historic harms?
These are the questions that have inspired the art, culture, and peoples we engage with in our zine, Portals. As students attending Brown University, the spaces we inhabit in Providence, Rhode Island are marked by blurred boundaries and isolated environments. Our own campus sits atop Providence’s College Hill, aloof from the rest of the city. While it encroaches into the West African and Latino neighbourhoods that surround it, and was constructed through the slave trade of John Brown, on land stolen from the Narragansett tribe, rare are the exchanges with members of these communities.
Our notions of space are complicated by the fact that any entry into public spaces are actually re-entries. Others have been there before us. Rationalizing the politics of space requires a reckoning with the politics of belonging. What does it mean to enter a new space that was not built for you?
The artistic collectives we have engaged with reimagine the city in bold, brave, poetic ways. Haus of Glitter, an intersectional collective occupying slave trader Esek Hopkins’ house, a monument to white supremacy, reclaims colonial sites through healing community action. Photographer Deana Lawson’s photographs of Black bodies in the domestic realm reflect the historical movement from the African continent to the ports of New England. Renegade artist Michael Townsend’s squats public spaces with his esoteric installations. Writer and photographer Loki Olin maps the urban landscapes and structures of Providence through the lens of car culture. Community art space AS220 fosters local artists and activists and promotes programs that challenge hegemonic cultures and systems. Through these actions, the city is transformed into a site of resistance, care, healing, justice, and liberation.
How do we maintain our individual identities and freedoms while exchanging freely with others? In an interview with art critic and curator Hans Ulricht Obrist, the visionary Martiniquan writer, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant proposes a praxis of archipelagic thinking, imploring us to engage with the realities of different people and places as we wander through the world as the islands do in the Caribbean.
“[W]e need archipelagic thinking, which is one that opens, one that conforms diversity — one that is not made to obtain unity, but rather a new kind of Relation. One that trembles — physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually — because it seeks the point, that utopian point, at which all the cultures of the world, all the imaginations of the world can meet and understand each other without being dispersed or lost.”
Let us imagine a utopian community of care in which we can grow through our exchange with others, without losing or diluting our subjectivities. We seek to uncover this ultimate portal – rooted in existing spaces, but radically imagined into existence, a freedom dream for the future.
“Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” – Audre Lorde