ADS2: Black Horizons – Worlding within the Ruins of Racial Capitalism

Since the institutions of the plantation and new world slavery crystallised into the structure of racial capitalism, whiteness – understood as “the ownership of the Earth forever and ever”, according to W.E.B. Du Bois – has dictated the production of global-world-space.

As the architecture of whiteness was secured against the negation of black life, blackness became its foundation and an unthought horizon. A Black Horizon undergirded the world of whiteness, and to paraphrase Hannah Black, the violently upheld myth that safety is real. What would it mean therefore to turn from the pursuit of a spatial typology of endless extraction and consumption, and set a course into the darkness of the Black Horizon? What possibilities for life emerge when facing the becoming black of the world and our premature death? What strategies for living can we learn from amongst the ruins of racial capitalism?

This year, ADS2 analyses the ruins of racial capitalism as a typology for understanding the role modern production and consumption cycles play in producing space. Students carried out a study of the spatial logics of supply chain capitalism and its uneven geographies of dispossession, working with photography and photogrammetry, film, sound, 3D modelling, and fabrication to develop spatial strategies for specific territories, spatial products, or infrastructures of ruination. Learning from the global south and drawing on black, indigenous and other-than-human epistemologies, student projects engage in the collective development of a new paradigm for architectural production. One which explores the possibility of multispecies life through non-extractive practices of worlding.