CARTOGRAPHIES OF BRAIDING

Advanced Studio,
Faculty: Abeer Seikaly
2022

​​In a crude way, Sydney wanted to braid the land, using the bodies sunken well beneath the collective memory of New Haven to rise to the surface. This was born out of two ideas: an article she read about bodies being unearthed and uprooted by fallen trees regularly from the New Haven Green and about that same Green being the end point of slavery in New Haven. The last person sold there was purchased for $10 and immediately emancipated. The braids are audacious like the women who make them, but they’re functional- using a kind of catenary system by casing them in concrete hung upside down, and flipping them. These nomadic sites, deployed adjacent to the domestic realm next to the porch or in the backyard, can independently generate senses of domesticity and in the urban realm and pay homage to the history in a public realm, like the Green. This object can be a generative thing where we can organically maintain our community, abstracted from languages and forms we understand. This proposes two iterations occur in New Haven: public park and a memorial.

Architecture