Editorial: “Yeah, They Were All Yellow”

Asian Feminist Architectural Possibilities is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Ruo Jia, supported by Pratt Institute, featuring contributions by Chong Gu and Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer, Samuel Hellmann, Nicholas Risteen, Clair Ryu, and Shayari de Silva.

Identity has a paradoxical existence. It is deployed in the narrative of seeking “one’s own,” yet it also implies some identicalness that is explicitly not; an identity that is shared and collective, that is a priori and allows one to belong, to grow “one’s own.” In a 2018 lecture at Harvard GSD, Bruno Latour mapped contrasting definitions of what used to be called “the natural world” in the form of seven planets. One of these was called “Identity,” which he claimed might be the biggest of all.1 According to Latour, surrounded by unresolvable traumas and looming crises, identity is where we seek avoidance, retreat, and negative empowerment. During the Q&A session, Latour was asked about the positive aspects of identity, as well as its significance in the creation of communities, to which he confessed his bias and framework of nation states.2 In this alternative sense, identity can be understood as a generative, positive force of possibility.

In Difference and Repetition (1968), Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between diversity and difference, writing that “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse.”3 Identity is therefore necessarily predetermined as well as moving; a basis for itself to emerge. Here identity can be understood as the problem, one that needs to be posed in order for the problem to be reached.4 However, the initial problem should be specific enough to move the process and indifferent enough so as to activate its abundance necessary for the line of flight of difference. The eventual problem is also neither an end, which would disconnect the process from the ground (and present), nor a solution to hold on to, which would disconnect itself from the ground (and present).5 Identity and the problem serve as the Other, “as the expression of a possible world.”6

It can be said that “Asian,” or “Feminist,” or “Architectural” are all non-existent signifiers of “initial problems,” but ones that are very present and possible. For example, “Asian” can be a geographical designation that has varied according to history; a specific race, a category constructed with violence and fluidity; or an aspired episteme that is even harder to pinpoint. Yet together, as three moving anchors in relation to each other, “Asian-Feminist-Architectural” forms a relatively coherent and stable triangulation where concrete material experiences can be gathered by certain specific moving identities. Within this space, these marginalities can not only come to find a place to belong, but also regain agency enabled by and enabling architecture. They do so by collectively and individually playing with one another in their differences and inquiring both discursively and nondiscursively into their iridescent “Possibilities.”

Architecture, the craft of making space contained by some structure, easily lends itself to thinking about ways of maintaining coherencies at various levels and scales—individual, family, nation, culture, race, gender, profession—in an ever-changing world. Moreover, architecture is about holding and realizing new spaces that germinate changes in the status quo. These spaces rely on collaborating with existing environments and social structures that have created established categories such as “Asian,” or “Feminist,” or even “Architectural.” However, self-aware of such complexities, they act in dialogue with the collective/individual moving identities of their architectonics. Instead of turning towards neoliberal individualism or relativist diversity, these spaces can tenderly create and produce with each other the positive differences of possibilities that propel structural changes in their worlding.