Season 1 Episode 01 Podcast Transcript
Interview with Dr. Menna Agha
Host: Priyanka Bista
Audio Engineer and Editor: Mary Anne Funk
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Welcome to Design for Spatial Justice Podcast Series launched by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Environment. This podcast brings you insights into the work of Visiting Faculty Fellows in Design for Spatial Justice Initiative. They are designers, researchers, and activists from around the world working on spatial justice issues at the intersection of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and income inequality. For the first four episodes, I’ll be your host, Priyanka Bista, a design for spatial justice fellow. My own work, which we’ll talk about in the final episode, is focused on biodiversity conservation and participatory design in Nepal.
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Priyanka
I’m bringing you our first guest here, Dr. Menna Agha, who is a researcher and an architect. She’s joining us via Skype from the Eugene campus. Menna has a PhD in architecture from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, a master’s degree in integrated design from Germany and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Egypt. Spatial justice is an overarching theme in Agha’s work but it was not a choice born of luxury. She is a third-generation Nubian woman whose family was displaced by the Egyptian state as part of the Aswan High Dam project in the 1960s. As an educator and a designer, she firmly believes that issues relating to spatial justice should be prominent in architecture studios, not just in academic settings.
Welcome, Menna! Great to have you here!
Menna
Hello Priyanka, thank you for doing all this effort to get our voices out. Thank you for the University of Oregon for giving us this platform.
Priyanka
So, I find your work inspiring in the ways you’re trying to decenter the Eurocentric narrative of architecture to bring forward an Afrocentric vision of what architecture is and can be. So, although I am originally from Nepal, I actually did my undergraduate degree in Toronto, so my introduction to architecture and architectural history was primarily Eurocentric.
We studied architectural history dating back to Mesopotamia and Egypt but there was very little room or no room at all to understand Asian architectural history, in particular that of Nepal.
So I find your intent in bringing forward an Afrocentric vision of architecture very important. So, let’s start the conversation with this topic: Why decenter? Why Afrocentric? Why the position of the other?
Menna
Well, the funny thing is, when you say you went to school in Toronto and everything was Eurocentric, I went to school in Cairo. And it was also Eurocentric. Even when we studied ancient Egyptian architecture, it came from a European imagination of that ancient Egyptian architecture, so even when dealing with you and your context, it comes from that European imagination. So this idea of a Eurocentric architecture, education is not really a monopoly in Western countries. It’s all over.
This is something immigrants and the other between brackets in quotations would sense is that we go into spaces and we code switch. But the problem is that when you go in and you switch and you go back. The problem is that when you go into the architecture space, there is no place to switch back and forward within the realm or within the field. You have to be epistemically displaced into understanding architecture within that singular perspective as a science, as a fixed field of study. And that’s it. All these other voices, all these other ways of drawing and representation in you, you have to throw away. So now I have to twist my hand and twist my imagination into thinking about what the professor wants us to think.
What kind of aesthetic do they want? What kind of a product do they want? Do they want us to focus on function? Do you want us to focus on form, you know, all these kind of things that we do actively every day in studio, all come at a cost of our own backgrounds because we don’t come into the architectural studio as blank slates. We have histories about space. We have understandings of space and visuals and ideas that might align and might not align with what the studio requires. But when you go into the studio, you have to push all of that aside to do what the studio wants you and twist yourself and reform yourself into they’re refined architects from within a Eurocentric paradigms and they Eurocentric field of practice.
I found this out during my PhD actually, when I used to try to engage with the field and engage with my grandmother and find out that what I say does not register with her. What I say when I ask her about public space and she’s like, what is public space? And to understand that even a notion like public space is not indigenous to her.
Maybe I should tell you that I come from a small village in the south of Egypt among the villages displaced by the high dam. In the 1960s, the Egyptian government decided that they wanted a new pyramid, a new national project, and they built this huge dam with a huge water reservoir that submerged the entirety of my people’s land within the Egyptian border, and poor people had to be displaced into these villages. So it is in my grandmother’s village of displacement, I have to go and ask her from my position as a researcher. So who do I serve? Who am I? What do I do here?
I want to go around and look at this idea of why does it not register with her? Because she exists in a different episteme. It’s a different cosmology. And I have displaced myself this one. And I have marginalized my grandmother’s voice in my head for the sake of my professor’s voice and for the sake of the job. And that’s why I stand where I stand. I am an Nubian woman and that’s my indigenous episteme. And I feel like the whole complex loses if the values that are within this episteme remain untapped or these intellectual resources, these other ways to see what is space, what is how do we deal with space? How do we build all these kinds of ways to look at the world gets it gets marginalized and we lose, through that. We lose the resources, we lose new things. We lose solutions to issues that we are struggling with now, like climate change, for example. There are so many answers within indigenous ontology about climate change that we really don’t tap into because it’s not encodes scientific.
Priyanka
I work primarily with indigenous communities across Nepal – and it’s been incredibly humbling to meet them and interact with them and learn about my own landscape of Nepal through their lens and they such detailed and intricate knowledge of their landscape, but however, it took me a very long time to arrive at a position where I could understand and appreciate indigenous knowledge as being equal to or maybe even higher in some cases, to scientific knowledge. It wasn’t always my opinion. Like many trained architects, I was conditioned to think in a certain way about the profession as all-encompassing through this eurocentric viewpoint. But then I realized, that hey maybe we don’t have all the answers and maybe we actually need to learn rather than do.
You also talk about how architecture is failing its social project. Could you elaborate on this topic.
Menna
Yes. You see all these narratives and meta-narratives or even slogans within architecture practice, even the most sanctified or most technical fields of architecture. It has a social project. We want to help people. We want to help the community. We want people to save money, even if it’s about sustainability or energy. We want to bring communities together. We want to strengthen social funds and so on and so forth. But for some reason, we are failing this social agenda. With this social agenda, I have to ask which society, exactly. There are several societies and there are several social contracts from within legal and moral and gender contracts in each of them. So when the architects decide to go in and to solve a societal issue with them standing, you know, their position is within their original space, not questioning it and not taking a critical distance from this current position where they stand. What do they understand? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to reside? What does it mean to dwell for them? And why is that different in that other place? It will definitely fail, especially because our God complex comes into play.
The field and the society and the way we deal with it is a very intricate and delicate emotional training that we are missing in our architecture education. How do we deal with people? How do we avoid othering and how do we train ourselves to see people as relational? How do we emerge ourselves in a society and not compromise our own moral agendas? But how also not to claim epistemic authority over people because we have degrees, because people have been building for centuries and they have been building awesome stuff and they never went to a university. The university is a relatively new concept in human history, but people have been building for millennia. So when I take it that just part of going to architecture school, I am the only one qualified here to make decisions about space and space making becomes problematic for us when we actually engage with the field. And also we get humbled with how little knowledge we have about that field if we allow ourselves to be humble, of course.
Priyanka
What I realized and again, having gone back and tried to give back to these rural communities, by building a school was that a lot of the young people were actually dropping out of schools. The head teacher was drunk most of the time. The school was closed most of the time. And and they were they were dropping out because they only had one future. And the future was actually becoming a migrant worker, essentially slave laborers in the Gulf to build these stadiums, museums and towers designed by starchitects.
Menna
Yeah, it breaks my heart because growing up in Egypt, I’m so linked to to that area of construction as a construction market, because we graduate and often travel there to find a more lucrative employment as salaries for architects in Egypt have plummeted in the last 15/20 years. So young architects graduate and go there. So we are so in contact with these cultures. And I also went into architecture with a huge fan, girling spirits behind Zaha Hadid. Zaha Hadid was this idol, this Iraqi woman who speaks Arabic like me. She has a dark skin like me, She’s ours, this this woman like us? She’s a large brown woman standing there and making buildings and making these awesome, intricate, weird forms and thinking all these celebrity liberty and agency to produce new shapes. And I was so, so in love with her work and obsessed with her until her project in Cacon? have been revealed as a project constructed by basically slave labor. When the contractor took all the passports from a thousand South East Asian immigrants who are working there, he took all the passports and they are basically working as slaves. And when she was asked about it, she said, that’s not our issue. We are not the construct, we are not the contractor. And then this was one of the slaps on my face also, looking at this field of architecture and looking at these idols and thinking, oh, do I want to be this person? Because I know that people who look like me from my village are going to be the workers, not the architects. So people who are like me are going to be the labor and not the people managing them. So it is yes. It somehow shows you how the field is so, so divorced from its social project.
Priyanka
I remember distinctly reading that that interview with Zaha Hadid, saying how we, we are architects, we’re not there to solve the social projects, our problems. And that it’s not our job. And I was thinking, no, it is our job. If we have designed something, how is it going to be built? We need to be aware of it. Who’s building it? Where are these people coming from? Where are they going back to? So I work now entirely with the migrant workers who have come back with diseases, with loans, actually with debt and many of them have died. There was a young boy who actually lost his father. The agency in Qatar or Dubai or wherever he was actually asked him for a thousand dollars, asked his family for a thousand dollars to ship the corpse back. And this family couldn’t, you know. And so they decided that they wouldn’t be able to bury their father because they can’t afford to.
Menna
Which is a great deal a great deal. In some pragmatic places. So when you say, yeah, he’s dead or, you know, it’s a great deal to indigenous communities around the world. People become so attached to the bodies of their departed. It’s such a grief. I’m just trying to emphasize how tragic that is. If somebody tells me I could not retrieve the body of my departed, it’s such a big deal.
I have seen families, villages collect funds to bring bodies back. So people would make something like a thousand dollar, three thousand people would contribute for it for a body to come back. This is how important this is. One of the worst losses of our displacement is leaving the graveyards. We’re going to leave our ancestors and go somewhere else. This was a big deal that the state did not understand, which comes to this idea about who defines space, who defines value. So if we say it’s important for us to live next to the graveyards of our ancestors, our space is not complete without our departed bodies being in proximity to us. This is how we define our space. And then you say, no, this is not important. You will go and you will exist biologically wherever we tell you to, because this is not important. What is important is what you can touch. So you see these kind of pragmatic ways in defining space itself becomes the first wave, the first wave of displacement, the ontological displacement. This is not important or this is not a priority. It’s not something that we are going to derail a national project for or if this is not something, we’re going to put more effort to send the body back to Nepal for. It’s such an ontological displacement in itself.
Priyanka
Absolutely. I think now that we’ve we’re talking about all the problems and there are many more that that the profession has. So I want to ask again and discuss if there is actually a room for disruption to create a different kind of more radicalized architectural practice. Is there room? And if so, do you have any thoughts?
Menna
I think it’s not about room for disruption as much as it is there should be opportunities for unseeing these realms and these values and these cosmologies. The problem is that when the studio is so comfortable within its context and does not want to put in the effort for unseeing, which sometimes challenges some of the pillars of the studio. Like for example, how do we draw? We have to do a perspective and a plan and a section. How about if I argue that in my ontology a section is too violent? I cannot imagine cutting my building. So if I argue that against a studio, within a fixed practice, within an established practice. The practice is going to push back against that ontology. But if there are an ability or a tendency to unsee things and accept that this is not the only human product. This is not the only knowledge that exists. And because we, our knowledge is going to touch people directly, we need to be aware of and of other knowledge or at least to have the tools to do it, to understand and take in and absorb other ways of knowledge and other ways of being and other ways of knowing. So I think there is an opportunity to do that. I think it just takes lots of audacity, you know. It just requires so much. not confrontation as in compacted of confrontation, but confrontation as in acknowledging my right to exist and be visible with my ideas and my episteme and my grounding.
While I myself, I’m struggling to unlearn and stand my actual ground because I am like I am now in a fight between my training, which has established itself. I am quite well trained architect now. I can do all the technical stuff, but I now try to delineate from that and go see how my grandmother would describe her space and find ways to speak my indigenous language again, visually and spatially and within that struggle inside me, I think. I am owed to stand within the studio and no longer allow it to be this apparatus of displacement.
Priyanka
I think another issue I’ve been struggling with for the past eight or so weeks and we’re almost at the end of term is how within a 10 week time period how do we bring in these complex ideas into an architectural studio setting? And I know you are, you are an advocate of bringing these ideas into the studio. And so, I think the final question is, is on this regard. How do we do that? Can we do that or do we need to reframe and rethink and and look at the entire MR curriculum and disrupt the entire MR curriculum and to bring in the deeper sort of understanding of spatial justice or really to start to unsee as you’re saying. What are your thoughts on this?
Menna
Yeah. Don’t get me started on the 10 weeks, which is actually nine weeks semester, because it makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a quick quiz. This is not a project. So don’t get me started on that. But on the other side, I have to shout out my studio participants because they have ran an intellectual marathon and they have all worked within a marginal cause and they have all did an amazing conceptualization from: queer space, to feminist economies to syndicalism to working on physically squatting, designing for the unhoused or for issues of the homeless family homelessness here and in Eugene. So they have actually ran an intellectual marathon. I’m so happy and I think they have created an impact on me and they have done the work to work toward this spatial justice and see something from a different perspective. So I think there is empirically evident from my studio that something can be done and people are excited and students, young, starting professionals are open to new and exciting new paradigms and new experiments, intellectual and emotional experiments. And I am actually very happy with that. So I think there is hope, lots of hope, but it starts with including emotional training. So how do we build emotional curriculums? How do we build the training for the architect to go out and deal with people and take in people?
Because it’s a load. It’s a lot of load over your chest when you go out and start working with a village of 2000 people, and try to serve them. That’s lots of emotional labor. And building itself is emotional labor. So how do we build curriculums for that? How do we know when we are displacing students or when we are agents of different institutions? How do we not nurture, nourish the struggles in indigenous and immigrant children in maintaining their voices? And how do we let them get their formal training? That’s not a problem, but not put aside they’re indigenous or original tools or toolkit for the sake of this kind of training.
Priyanka
I need to take your studio class, I think. Sounds really exciting and interesting. I’m also very amazed at how sensitive my students have also been to the context of Nepal, to biodiversity, which is another very complicated factor. So I agree with you that there is hope and that students are interested in this alternative direction and understanding architecture beyond, you know, the Western confines. So I really congratulate you on doing a great job.
Menna
Well, thank you very much for doing this, Priyanka, you are inspiring all of us. Your work erupts through my studios now. People do research and I ask for our research on research and the research comes up with your work embedded in it about justice in architecture representation. So I have to tell you, you’re also an inspiration literally to my students’ work.
Priyanka
Thank you so much, Manna, for such an inspiring and engaging discussion around many issues, but really fundamentally about spatial justice. As a nonwhite female in the field of architecture, I think your words has really served as an inspiration to me. So I’m sure the audience listening at home will also be very inspired. So thank you very much.
Cue Music
Thank you for joining us on our first episode. This is Priyanka Bista, your host, signing off, along with Mary Anne Funk, our editor, from Portland, Oregon, with music by Chicoco Radio, all the way from the waterfront settlements of Port Harcourt Nigeria.
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