A short movie from the point of view of Walker, an unhoused inhabitant of Mare Island
black + blue
Selected for publication in GroundUp Journal Issue 10 and Healing Space
client: Urban Design Studio, UC Berkeley
location: Mare Island, Vallejo, California
year: 2020
This transformative landscape urbanism project reimagines Mare Island, a former naval base in Vallejo, in collaboration with the Museum of the African Diaspora. Delving deep into themes like "origins," "movement," "adaptation," and "transformation" tied to African history, the design uses lenses like "society/separation," "panopticon/protest," and "beaches/bullets" to critically examine the dualistic nature of colonial design. Titled "Black & Blue," this initiative uniquely reflects upon postcolonial landscapes through poetic exploration and alternative narratives. Garnering widespread recognition, it was prominently published, further amplifying its impact. As a queer person of color from a former colony now residing in a de facto colony, this project was profoundly personal, offering invaluable insights and growth.
who belongs and who does not?
who is native and who is not?
what is empty?
what is nullius?
what then asks for destiny to be manifested?
MOAD shows memory as a living, breathing entity that's been whispered down generations--shifting, changing form
The North shows the horror of the past-present and the moment that comes thereafter
The North critiques nativity, home and terra (and hence) homo nullius
black is still alive and living its truth.
it is not to be put in a glass box.
memorialization is static and is death.
memorialization is for coffins and graves.
concept + background
Feagin's White Racial Frame (1990)
paintings as organizing logic
conceptual trail through site capturing four movements
context: location within Mare Island
act 1: design
The story of Mare Island is black and blue, where blue is the colonial and black is the exhumed oppositional.
In 1944 the Navy published a guide to the command of Negro Personnel; a document that taught the Blue how to avoid the appearance of discrimination. A couple of months later, Port Chicago--20 miles away from Mare Island—is one of the first to receive black enlistees that aren’t just general service. They get to load ammunition too.
A couple of days later there is a blast. 200 black men die.
Three weeks later, the surviving black stevedores—still in shock from the blast—are sent to Mare Island to load ammunition again. 328 refuse and are threatened at gunpoint. 258 hold their ground and are made to stand on a barge for 3 days straight. All but 50, return to work. The 50 are tried for mutiny, because self-preservation is a crime, and are sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment.
3 years later Willie Long starts working at the Mare Island shipyard. 20 years later, there are more than 1000 black workers on Mare Island suffering the same cruelty as the 328 did decades earlier. Willie leads 20 others and demands change.
Both the Mutiny 50 and the 21ers—as they were called later—created ripples at the national level. They challenged systemic injustice and brought about reforms leading to the desegregation of the Navy and the passing of the Civil Rights Act respectively.
Yet, there is nothing on the island that betrays the weight of its past.
The landscape of mare island hides the black and celebrates the blue.
My vision for the northside of the island reverses this duplicity by exhuming the black and critiquing the blue. The black in this context encompasses both the past (the mutiny 50 and Mare Island 21ers), as well as the present (the 6557 victims of police Blue brutality in the US in the last 5 years, and the homeless that have made the cracks and crevices of the Northside of the island their home).
My proposal explores the tripartite system of: society & separation, panopticon & protest and beaches & bullets, through four distinct moments in the landscape located at the four sites: the barracks palimpsest, the radio tower, the submarine pier and the overpass. The broader landscape of my proposal evokes postcolonial memories of what home means, of who is allowed to belong and when land is considered empty.
By being designed to support transient human life, it challenges the colonial idea of parks as interstitial recreational spaces and celebrates the importance of a porch in the face of a colonial housing crisis; a black home in the face of a blue existential crisis.
story
act 2: diary
When our studio director, Walter Hood, tasked us with redesigning the Northern half of Mare Island—a place I’d never heard of before, I did what most people do: I googled it.
I found pages and pages singing of the glory of the American Navy, as well as a masterplan for the redevelopment of the Northside. The masterplan reimagines the island as a vast expanse of rolling greens: ubiquitous in their rootlessness and fueled by nostalgia that hides the fact that colonial lawns were only made possible by slave labor. Nothing in the current or imagined landscape tells the true story of the island writ in blood, sweat and tears.
This story of hiding the “Other” is a tale that I am all too familiar with.
Look at the landscapes around you—most parks, buildings, neighborhoods, even entire cities look the same. What stories do they tell? Who are they designed for? What agenda do they serve?
All my life, I have felt out of place. I have always been the Other.
The Other in India. The Other in France. The Other in Kuwait, Dubai, Cyprus, Canada, the US—all the countries that I have called home at some point.
I have always been (made) aware
of the color of my skin,
of what I carry between
(not within),
of who I love
(how I sin).
I was raised to minimize my Self; to live only at intersections.
I have never been the protagonist.
I have never occupied space designed for someone like me.
(And unless you’re a white cishet man, chances are you haven’t either.)
This landscape of half-truths that we live in, is not by accident. It has been designed by the lie of ‘post-colonialism’—a lie that I know all too well, as someone who comes from a former colony and currently lives in a de facto colony.
“Post-colonialism” implies that we are past colonialism.
But when I am still the “Other”;
when people are African-American and Asian American,
but never European-American;
when freedom is still “given”
when liberty is still “prescriptive”,
—it is still very much a colonial world we live in.
Armed with the weight of my being, in a world shaped by hands that would shackle mine—my only duty as an architect and a planner is to build spaces for the truth to breathe.
So as Mare Island stood before me, demanding that I exhume its truth—I grappled with questions that questioned me:
How do you design a landscape when your vocabulary is colonial?
Who belongs and who does not?
Who is native and who is not?
What is empty?
What is terra—and hence homo—nullius?
What then asks for destiny to be manifested?
I don’t know, but I am learning. What I do know, however, is that the answers live in the truth: the “Other” is only the other when the Colonial is the normal.
The truth is, and has always been, that we are the protagonists—
and it is finally time our spaces reflected our healing.
scenes
