Remembering Through Spatial Storytelling

Introduction

Spatial storytelling has the power to facilitate remembering—excavating, scavenging, fabulating, and making sense of what Saidiya Hartman calls the scraps of official “stable” archives, ones that only whisper slithers of Black women’s lives. It can also affirm and transmit what interdisciplinary historian Sónia Vaz Borges calls “errant archives,” sitting in the mouths of many who have experienced, frequented, lived, and manifested spaces that no longer exist. In Borges’s words, the errant archive is “made of people, their stories, memories, experiences, and reflections. It is not fixed in space, place, and the information that these errant archives provide are not frozen in time. The memories that the errant archive shares are expressed in diverse forms, according to the context in which it is consulted and the conversation that develops.”1

Energized by the 1971 Swiss women’s suffrage referendum, many initiatives in Zurich emerged in the 1970s that were critical for the progress of women’s liberation. However, many of these often overlooked the intersectional experiences of racialized foreign women. The Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (“The Meeting Place for Black Women”) was unique in that it provided a meeting place and resource center for Black foreign women in Zurich that allowed often isolated women to access a wider constellation of social and cultural infrastructure.2 Originally opened in 1993, the Treffpunkt was located at Manessestrasse 73. In 2010, it closed, and in 2014 the building that held it was demolished and replaced by a new one. No perceivable architectural traces can be found where it once stood. The archive of its life sits in the mouths of those who frequented it, lingering in personal photo albums and appearing scarcely in publicly accessible texts. Otherwise, within both city and official Swiss archives, the organization remains absent.

Borges reflects on her experience working in official archives, remarking that “we rescue memories here, but we can also silence and bury them through unoccupied shelves and rooms.”3 Artistic practice is therefore a possible conduit for transmitting collective memory and vessel for housing it. Drawing or collaging can be helpful for abstracting elements and encapsulating conditions that are not always fixed in time or scale. Ontologically, collage is incredibly potent for resisting the objectification of Black women in images within dominant architectural archives.4 By layering conversations and found materials, this mode of spatial storytelling is an ongoing attempt to affirm and transmit the lived and spatial qualities that were held by the Treffpunkt. Ultimately, it aims to offer ways to listen to official archives with absences and center unofficial archives that are read as absences.

Given that the Treffpunkt and its history relies on errant archives, collage is an instrument of citation that can layer and attribute voices that conventional archives might consider as secondary, unstable, and subjective. Collage here becomes a facilitator of dialogue, particularly when it is created in response to dialogues, and in so doing forms layers within processes of remembering. Collage has the potential to conjure memories forgotten when reflected on in commune, further presenting an opening with which to imagine continuations, evolutions, and possible futures of the Treffpunkt and the many spatialities of Black foreign women living, rooting, and homing in Zurich. This process of imagination and storytelling is one way of remembering, of reflecting history.

On Poetics: A Practice of Citation

Architects have the technical dexterity to give image to imagination, and further, to imagine from image. The images we have today—objects, buildings, bodies, photographs—are more than often misaligned with aspirations for other possible realties, particularly when concerning Black life. By this I mean that the material conditions set and upheld by systems of domination—capitalism, racial-sexual discrimination, ecological catastrophe, nation-state boundaries and property—suppress the images that Black people desire to make of themselves and surround themselves with.

Within this context, architectural and artistic practices present hopeful methods with which to dream together about other possible futures that go beyond current material conditions. This entails remembering what has been and accounting for what is going on. Focusing on remembering as a present particle—that is to say remembering, and not memory or remembrance—suggests that while we continue to recover that which has happened, we also recognize the potential for changeability. Echoing Borges, “between the memory and the process of remembering, there is a social space with whole social practices and processes.”5 Remembering is participating in that social space.

Remembering is also imagining. Because remembering is not fixed, history is not fixed. And space is bound up with history. Borges calls us to think about this entanglement when she writes: “memory and space are inseparable, because if memory produces spaces, its own existence is impossible without a space, which allows us to assume that the space also produces the memory.”6 Since remembering is one way of accounting for history, history itself is in constant mutation and movement. Spatial storytelling might then treat collages as vignettes of stories that can continue to evolve as they circulate in conversation, rather than appearing as stamps or markers of time, event, authorship, territory, and property.

Might we allow ourselves the room to tell the multiple and mutable stories of how it all went down? Might we allow history to be a facilitator of dialogue in flux, instead of a fixed record and often assertion of the dominant class? In architectural academia, we are taught to cite through drawing (plans, sections, elevations) according to convention (usually without people, with standard measurements, with certainty). While these conventions are useful, they run the risk of perpetuating homogenous and dominant values. Furthermore, in the context of architectural history, we are taught to cite according to stability, in other words, giving validity to and being validated by references pushed and processed through conventions and standards of knowledge production, which privilege academia and written form. We are taught to cite scientifically and to draw based on drawn precedent—in other words, to locate the source that must already be known.

But how, then, do we refer to histories that have not been drawn, that are not renowned, and that within traditional architectural logics, are absent? How do we join the ongoing and longstanding forms of citation that operate—often under challenging and oppressive conditions—to remember and attribute bodies of knowledge outside of “normal” conventions? How do we cite those who came before us: the non-experts, mothers, grannies, family members, holding stories archived in their mouths; the bystanders, fugitives, strangers, spectators, participants who leave no formal identification, no “name, surname, date — plan, section, elevation”? The philosophical position that our voices are entangled with others, or what in Southern Africa is referred to as ubuntu, meaning “I am because we are,” opens up possibilities for recognizing, attributing, and citing. Practices of citation that employ and embody poetics as legitimate frames can help us deal with taking constantly shifting perspectives seriously as references. References are not fixed. As Katherine McKittrick writes, “I do not believe that citation, as a practice that includes or excludes is useful. I am not interested in citations as quotable value. I want to reference other possibilities such as, citations as learning, as counsel, as sharing."7 Such acts call for layering.

Excavating, Patching, Layering: Collage as a Practice of Remembering

Collage can reconcile and imagine absent spatiality. In the case of the Treffpunkt, collage can serve as a vehicle for merging oral histories into a spatial archive that can be accessed and experienced as one of many cultural heritages in the city today. Collage can excavate, patch, and layer the kaleidoscope of voices and perspectives that make up this complex history. Collage opens up possibilities to render the invisible visible, subverting the erasure of Black women in image-making; confronting the absence of the place that constituted their spatiality and in so doing presencing it.8 Collage is a medium to resist, subvert, and dissolve controlling images of Black women that are riddled with negative connotations such as “third world,” dark, chaotic, promiscuous, poor, and disposable, to name a few. Collage also presents an opportunity to not only articulate representation but also to communicate diverse modes of cognizance that can inform how we understand and reflect on our complex spatial environments. As landscape theorists Blake Belanger and Ellen Urton argue, “the promise of photomontage rests not only with a finished product but also with its power to catalyze ideas.”9

There is only one book accounting for the Treffpunkt: Terra Incognita? Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen in Zürich (1990–2010). Within it, in the essay “HerStory: Die Geschichte des Treffpunkts Schwarzer Frauen,” Shelley Berlowitz and the key initiator of the Treffpunkt, Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, include a series of vignettes, some quotes and reflections from Meierhofer-Mangeli, which serve as fertile ground for filling in the absence of the archive.10

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Yearnings for Homeplace, from Within the Nuclear Family House, 2024.

Where I came from, there were no housewives. Now I was suddenly sitting there, in the Zurich suburbs of the 1980s, and I was a housewife. I spoke German, took part in flea markets organized by the women's association in the village and always greeted my neighbors with a hearty “Gruezi.” But there was a loneliness inside me that kept spreading. When I gave birth to my daughters, I was alone. My husband had been given just one day off work for the births.11 There was no room where I could sit and talk with other women: about our lives, the children, everyday life, the men. I missed the exchange of information about the village, family, friends and girlfriends. Yes, I even missed the gossip.12 I was sitting there with a husband who worked outside the home every day, two small children, polite neighbors and a very clean flat. As a young Black mother and wife in the countryside near Zurich, I lived completely isolated from the Black community. I had to find other Black women in whom I could mirror myself in order to survive in this foreign territory and for the sake of my mental health.13 Individual encounters showed me that other Black women had similar issues. There was an urgent need to integrate and be integrated, to belong and to fill everyday life with my own life.14 But there was no room for questions and dialogue, for answers and mutual support. My integration was dependent on the goodwill and whims of those around me. It was not based on a political stance, understanding and dialogue.15
—Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli

Yearnings for Homeplace, from Within the Nuclear Family House (2024) is an imaginary made up of archival and contemporary materials, primarily photos of the Treffpunkt from the personal archives of women who belonged to it.16 One important image, appearing in the top right corner, was taken by Gertrud Vogler, who, as one of the most renowned leftist photographers at the time, was invited to document life at the Treffpunkt. Another layer highlights the culturally isolating environment of Black people in Switzerland during the 1980s and 1990s, further emphasized by the subtitled film still background, from the 2022 film Je suis noires by Rachel M’bon. These layers traverse historical and contemporary perspectives, illustrating the response of self-initiative taken by Black women within a socially complicated yet infrastructurally uncomplicated context.

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Resisting Controlling Images, Through the Shopfront, 2024.

The ground floor on Manessestrasse was a commercial space: facing the street was the shop with a shop window, and to the rear was another small room as well as a kitchen and bathroom. The meeting place was clearly visible from the outside: African handicrafts, wood carvings, paintings and posters hung and lay on the walls and in the window sill. The tables were covered with African cloths and the lighting was set up to show off the colourful scenery. “I think it was the first shop window in Switzerland to showcase strong and committed Black women.17 It was pure ethnic kitsch, but it gave us a sense of home and ownership.”18
—Zeedah Meierhofe-Mangeli

Resisting Controlling Images, Through the Shopfront (2024) attempts to imagine and image the spatial quality of the storefront from the interior of the Treffpunkt. The foreground layers in black-and-white come from photos, taken by photographer Gertrud Vogler, of one of the monthly gatherings hosted by the Treffpunkt in which their doors would be opened to the public to enjoy socializing over food. The intention of these gatherings was to encourage reciprocal social integration in which mixity was not only experienced through socializing across cultures but also expressed and affirmed through the visual display of the interior from the street.

Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, A Room of One’s Own, 2024.

The Women of Black Heritage had unpleasant experiences when they met in public. At one of their first meetings in a Zurich pub, when they discussed strategies and ways of dealing with their lives as a minority in Switzerland, their meeting turned into a gauntlet. The men in the restaurant laughed, waved, winked at the group of women and sent the waiter to the table with suggestive letters. Women and men at the other tables were amused by the group. The twelve Black women tried to keep their composure—but they quickly realized that they no longer wanted to expose themselves to such situations. Afterwards, they held their meetings in their living rooms;19 they entertained each other and, as many of them tell us today, their gatherings were a pleasure, not only from a spiritual and emotional point of view, but also from a culinary one. But there were often logistical problems, as not all living rooms offered enough space. They were also dependent on the goodwill of the respective families, and the demands of children and husbands had to be met. If the question of space was sometimes a problem for the Women of Black Heritage, it became an existential question for the planned meeting place. The meeting place had to be a public, neutral space with low-threshold access for all Black women who wanted to come.20
—Zeedah Meierhofe-Mangeli

A Room of One’s Own (2024) is an imagination of an interior that combines the qualities of intimacy and recluse that the domestic sphere offers from found materials online, with archival images from the Treffpunkt taken by women at the Treffpunkt. It illustrates how the Treffpunkt offered an atmosphere similar to the domestic spheres that served as meeting places for many Black women in Zurich before it opened. Cooking was critical for gathering, sharing culture through food and forming kinship by collectively creating a culture of care.

On Spatial Storytelling, Remembering, and Archiving

Through the layering of time, place, form, and bodies; collage retells stories. Within the telling of these stories, as McKittrick suggests, the function of referencing and citation is “not to master knowing and centralize our knowingness, but to share how we know, and share how we came to know imperfect and sometimes unintelligible but always hopeful and practical ways to live this world as black.”21

An archive is a place of imagination, holding oscillating perspectives that reflect on what happened and question the future. This is all facilitated through the critical fabulation of image-making.22 Image-making—or drawing otherwise—both gives an imprint of what was seemingly sweeping by, while at the same time inviting us to think about what is at stake today, to imagine and image other possible futures. The subjective and the personal cannot and should not be avoided when drawing otherwise, as it is positions and positionalities that bring imaginaries to image. By citing those who helped us get here, we account for the multiplicity of the creation of spaces and hold ourselves accountable as part of that multiplicity. It is a political practice to draw, and to draw otherwise is to dare to think beyond current material conditions.

Poetics as a practice of citation gives room for personal encounters to sit in relation to contexts, events, buildings, and bodies. These personal entanglements inform ways in which to continually read matter and value what matters. Personal conversations, with all of their twangs, slangs, and tangents, are additional frames of reference, and constitute a moment of what Tina Campt calls “archival encounter.”23 Conversations about and from the Treffpunkt hold and expand in meaning when taken as primary sources for remembering spatiality, imagining spatiality, and imaging spatiality. Spatial storytelling is a method with which to remember collectively, using visuals as facilitators of dialogue, prompting those who were there to recover, those who weren’t to layer, and all of us concerned to imagine. It is one way to archive absences, or better yet, to confront the absences we meet with the presences we feel.24