DocTalks is a series dedicated to ongoing investigations by doctoral, postdoctoral, or early-career researchers into the expansive entanglement of architecture and the natural environment. These sessions are meant to create an intercollegiate cohort of scholars who workshop writing, share research findings, and experiment with methodological tools while engaging with the vision and investigations of the Ambasz Institute.
These Doc Talk sessions are intended for scholars or architecture history and theory, but scholars in related fields and the general public are welcome to attend.
Field Work: Tina Modotti and the Free Schools of Agriculture, México, 1926–32
Speaker
Nikki Moore, Wake Forest University
In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed two men in a dry field holding a bedsheet behind an ascending row of maize plants in Mexico’s Central Valley. On the left stands a student from one of the region’s Indigenous communal farming villages; on the right, India’s expat and México’s first geneticist, Pandurang Khankhoje. One of 50 images recently bequeathed by Dr. Savitri Sawhney to the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca, México, this little-known work by Modotti, Teozinte (Euchlaena Mexicana) (1928), documents a series of experiments in which decolonial Indigenous agricultural science and art activism were made one. Each newly bequeathed image marks an uncharted moment in Mexico’s scientific, aesthetic, and political postrevolutionary development: namely, the emergence of 30 Free Schools of Agriculture. Supported by Mexican modernists Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, and Modotti, and run by First Nation teachers, the Free Schools were an educational organization that centered Indigenous land restitution goals via demonstrations of agricultural abundance, self-sufficiency, and what we now call environmental justice.
Too often seen as a passive eye documenting the work of others in the Mexican avant-garde who tokenized ancient First Nations aesthetics, this paper argues that with the addition of Dr. Sawhney’s collection, both Modotti and her photography emerge as protagonists championing a complex visual politics of living postrevolutionary Indigenous agency and thriving. As such, Modotti’s work with the Free Schools of Agriculture necessitates a rethinking of the photographer’s oeuvre, as she leveraged her lens, published photos, and circulated prints to reclaim the image of the region’s First Nations from the photographic categories of discrimination they had endured in the press, while celebrating each community’s stake in Mexico’s modern future.
Dr. Nikki Moore, SMArchS, is an assistant professor at Wake Forest University. Her current research focuses on the intersection of art, architectural practice, and social justice within histories of food-based commodity development in modern Latin America. Between 2018 and 2020, Moore was a fellow with the University-Based Institute for Advanced Study Intercontinental Academia. Her research is supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Wagoner Foundation, Wake Forest University, and the Society of Architectural Historians.
A Map of Hong Kong’s Hidden Music Peripheries: Post-1980s
Speaker
Diego Caro, University of Navarra
Floor 26 of Ho King Commercial Centre in Yau Ma Tei, the elevator stops. At the end of the corridor, the sound of a heavy metal band, detuned screams buffered by the cracked plywood door of a tiny music studio. Outdated factory buildings in Kwun Tong, industrial architecture gradually surrounded by new commercial and residential complexes; their precarious wait for urban renewal has offered an opportunity for young musicians to establish music studios, classrooms, or improvised bedrooms where music and teenage discoveries mingle with the noise of machinery. Tiny, closed shops with an infinitude of colorful objects that repose after a long day of sales, evoking a sense of initiation into Hong Kong’s underground music scene. The queue is the origin of casual conversations around an orange metallic cube that turns black, green, or purple in the inside, where the combination of sounds and lights acts as a social condenser via the affective power of music.
This research project maps the musical peripheries that coexists with the boisterous rhythm of Hong Kong from within. It encompasses visiting and studying spaces for music, drawing and photographing these often ephemeral venues, analyzing them in reference to the city’s real estate dynamics and sociopolitical context, interviewing the main stakeholders, and reading the stories behind the music to decipher the role of art production in the current context of Hong Kong. By wandering around the spatial networks formed by hundreds of musicians scattered in unexpected secluded venues around the city, this research seeks an alternative understanding of the diverse struggles over placeness in the city through the lenses of emergent culture, showcasing artists’ “tactics” to counter the commodification of creativity in a tightly controlled bureaucratic society.
Diego Caro holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the history and theory of modern architecture, urbanism, and the urban spaces shaped by global capitalism, with a particular emphasis on contemporary urban and artistic phenomena in Spain and Hong Kong. He has worked in renowned architecture firms such as Kengo Kuma, Vector Architects, and Neri & Hu. Currently, he works as a freelance designer and serves as a professor of modern art and culture and design at the University of Navarra. In addition to his architectural practice, he leads the audiovisual project Diego Case, through which he engages with various musical networks worldwide.
Session respondent
Adam Jasper, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This event was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.