Sónia Vaz Borges, “On the Space of Imaginations and the Space of Memories: Remembering the CONAKRY PAIGC Headquarters,” The Funambulist Magazine (November 18, 2021), ➝.
Referred to as the “Treffpunkt” from this point forward.
Borges, “On the Space of Imaginations.”
Khensani de Klerk, “Resisting the Controlling Image,” The Architectural Review (July/August 2021).
Borges, “On the Space of Imaginations.”
Borges, “On the Space of Imaginations.”
Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor),” in Dear Science and Other Stories (New York: Duke University Press, 2021), 14–34.
de Klerk, “Resisting the Controlling Image.”
Blake Belanger and Ellen Urton, “Situating Eidetic Photomontage In Contemporary Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Journal 33, no. 2 (2015): 109–26.
Shelley Berlowitz and Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, “HerStory : die Geschichte des Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen,” Terra Incognita? Der Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen in Zürich (Zurich: Limmat Verlag, 2013). I have translated all of the excerpts to English from German.
Bearing in mind that before 2021, paternity leave in Switzerland was officially one paid working day. See: FSIO, Federal Social Insurance Office, “Paternity Leave,” BSV (December 7, 2022), ➝.
Sonic practice is a practice of refusal, every time we sing, speak, gossip, convene, conspire — we refuse to be disposed of what ancestrally we have lost. When we speak, we are stitching, patching, excavating. Here, I am reminded of the writing of Tina Campt in her book Listening to Images (2017).
Consider the depth of survival by taking into account the multitude of deaths possibly faced by Black people. Ruth Wilson Gilmore clarifies this by describing how racism, being a state-sanctioned and legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities, leads to premature (social, civil and/or corporeal) death. Gilmore’s reflections are cited by Moten and Harney in: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013).
I am reminded of the words of politician Juliet Bucher as she shares in I will be Different Every time: Black women in Biel (2020): “When I hear the word integration here, I always have the feeling that we are the only ones who can do this work. But in a globalized world, everyone has to integrate all the time. We all have to try to understand each other better. It can't just go in one direction and it can't mean that ‘we’ and get involved in a supposedly fixed Swiss culture, because there is no such thing.” See: Fork Burke, Franziska Schutzbach, and Myriam Diarra, eds., I will be different every time : schwarze Frauen in Biel = femmes noires à Bienne = black women in Biel (Biel/Bienne: Verlag die Brotsuppe, 2020).
Berlowitz and Meierhofer-Mangeli, “HerStory,” 42–43.
The title of the work cites bell hooks as she writes in “Homeplace (a site of resistance),” (1990): “however fragile and tenuous, {the construction of the homeplace} had a radical political dimension … one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist.” Quoted in bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 42.
Patricia Hill Collins writes: “by insisting on self-definition, Black women question not only what has been said about African-American women but the credibility and the intentions of those possessing the power.” In this case, the storefront presented the women at the Treffpunkt an opportunity to define the image of themselves within the urban environment, representing a critical spatial component for building Black feminist consciousness in the space and to an extent, in the city. See: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 114.
Berlowitz and Meierhofer-Mangeli, “HerStory,” 54.
Echoing hooks as she writes, “domestic space has been a crucial site for organizing, for forming political solidarity. Homeplace has been a site of resistance.” See: hooks, Yearning, 47.
That low-threshold constituted a set of signs coded with Black life, signaling to Black women that they were welcome. In fact, here we can draw from hooks’s homeplace in echoing that with this space, “{Black women} can regain lost perspective, give life new meaning. {Black women} can make homeplace that space where we return for renewal and self-recovery, where we can heal our wounds and become whole.” See: hooks, Yearning, 49. Excerpt from: Berlowitz and Meierhofer-Mangeli, “HerStory,” 50–51.
McKittrick, “Footnotes,” 17.
Saidiya Hartman describes critical fabulation as the “combining of historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record.” See: Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe : A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Here I join other scholars thinking in similar terms about archival practice by echoing and referencing an existing lexicon of “archiving absence” brought forward by the gta Archive (2022).