The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation
Nina Valerie Kolowratnik in conversation with Jordan H. Carver and Mark Wasiuta

Join us at e-flux on Wednesday, February 5, at 7pm for an evening celebrating the recent publication of Nina Valerie Kolowratnik’s The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation, the tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen and published by Sternberg Press (2019).
The author will be in conversation with Jordan H. Carver and Mark Wasiuta.

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.

Today, most Western legal forums utilized by Indigenous communities for recognition of their rights continue to employ evidentiary rules that do not allow for Native truths to be accepted as “reliable” evidence. When tribes are asked to provide proof of their traditional connection to the land, what Western legal forums accept as documentation does not truly represent or respect tribal culture and traditional formats of knowledge transfer.

Kolowratnik’s research focuses on the double bind Pueblo communities in the American Southwest are confronted with when they become involved in a legal effort to reclaim and protect ancestral lands, since the process of producing evidence runs counter to their structural organization around oral history and cultural secrecy. The spatial notational systems developed by Kolowratnik with the support of Hemish people, members of Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico, and presented in this volume are an attempt to produce evidentiary documentation that speaks Native truths while respecting demands on secrecy. These systems also attempt to instigate a dialogue where there currently is none, deconstructing the fixed opposition between secrecy and disclosure within Western legal systems.

Nina Valerie Kolowratnik is an architect and researcher developing notational systems in the context of forced migration and cultural claims to territory. Since 2014 she has been teaching graduate courses on borderlands and counter-narratives at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and TU Vienna. She coedited Promiscuous Encounters (GSAPP Books, 2014) and the “Fluchtraum Österreich” issue of the journal asyl aktuell (2015). Recently, her work has been shown at Rotor Graz, Stacion Prishtina, the UN conference Habitat III in Quito, and the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Her research has been supported by the Architectural League of New York, the Graham Foundation and the Austrian Federal Chancellery, among others.

Jordan H. Carver is a writer, educator, and designer based in New York. He is the author of Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (UR, 2018) and co-author of America Recovered (Actar, 2019). Jordan is managing editor of Theory & Event, a contributing editor to the Avery Review, and core member of Who Builds Your Architecture? He is currently a Henry M. MacCracken Doctoral Fellow in American Studies at New York University.

Mark Wasiuta is co-director of the CCCP program at Columbia GSAPP. Wasiuta is currently an M+/Design Trust Research Fellow and a Graham Foundation Fellow. His research and exhibition practice focuses on the documents and archives of under-examined projects of the postwar period. Recent exhibitions include Media Habitat c. 1975 at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and Control Syntax Songdo at MAXXI in Rome.

Nina Valerie Kolowratnik 
The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation
Critical Spatial Practice 10
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen 
Featuring artwork by Trevor Paglen
Design by Zak Group
November 2019, English
10.5 x 15 cm, 150 pages, 39 b/w ill. softcover with dust jacket 
ISBN 978-3-95679-097-3
www.sternberg-press.com

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.