The Petro-Biennial Complex: Petro-Colonialism, Petro-Philanthropy, and Petro-Culture
Ana María León and Andrew Herscher, co-founders of SCCP, present two aspects of their research: on the petro-biennial complex which explores the role of BP as lead sponsor of the biennial, reframing its ambitions; and on the colonialcene, diffusing the border between settler colonial and climate justice apprehensions of the territory. They will also be joined by Marge Bruchac and Paulo Tavares for a live discussion.
SCCP Petro-Biennial Complex Pamphlet
Live event on March 17, 2021, 5:00pm EDT
Settler Colonial City Project
SCCP is a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization. Their work has been published through a dossier on the e-flux online platform and in exhibition at the American Indian Center and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Transition / Transformation
This program is part of the PPEH Annual Topic focus on Transition/Transformation, directed by Associate Professor of Architecture Daniel A. Barber. As Barber writes: While transition relies on technologies to render existing patterns more efficient, transformation elicits conceptual inquiries and creative explorations; it encourages scholars and artists to consider non-dominant epistemologies, to craft new narratives, to work towards public engagement, and to collectively articulate aspirations for a post-carbon society.
Ana María León
Ana María León is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her work studies how spatial practices of power and resistance shape the modernity of the Americas. León teaches at the University of Michigan and is co-founder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including the Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop, Nuestro Norte es el Sur, and the Settler Colonial City Project. She has co-organized several teacher-to-teacher workshops exploring architectural history’s relationship to intersectional feminism, the global, the South, decolonization, and antiracism. Her book, Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in March 2021.
Andrew Herscher
Andrew Herscher is co-founding member of a series of militant research
collaboratives including the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, Detroit Resists, and the Settler Colonial City Project. In his own work, he endeavors to bring research on architecture and cities to bear on struggles for rights, justice, and democracy across a range of global sites. Among his books are Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012), Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017), and, with Daniel Bertrand Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). He teaches at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.
Marge Bruchac
Margaret M. Bruchac (Abenaki) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Affiliated Professor in the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania (see: https://anthropology.sas.upenn.edu/people/margaret-bruchac). Dr. Bruchac has long been committed to critical studies of colonial histories, archives, museums, oral traditions, and archaeological practice, while developing interpretations of Indigenous histories that challenge erasures and stereotypes. She has received research awards from the American Philosophical Society, Five College Fellowship, Ford Foundation, and the School for Advanced Research, among others. Her 2018 book – Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (University of Arizona Press) – received the inaugural Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award. Bruchac directs a restorative research project – “The Wampum Trail” – that focuses on the history, meaning, materiality, curation, repatriation, and revitalization of historical wampum objects over time (see: https://wampumtrail.wordpress.com/). Dr. Bruchac is also on the team of Penn professors recently awarded a Mellon Foundation “Just Futures” Grant for “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present.”
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