Through their methodology of call-and-response, the SAAY/YAAS collective prompts three African and diasporic women architects in their ongoing attempt to examine/probe the orienting artefact of ‘the architectural brief’.

her(e), otherwise: Bordeaux 

Patti Anahory, Anna Abengowe, Tuliza Sindi and Mawena Yehouessi invite Meriem Chabani, Khensani de Klerk, and Ilze Wolff to join them in languaging ways of situating oneself in a space that is unfamiliar, but also uncanny through histories steeped in African enslavement and extraction as its infrastructural building blocks.

her(e), otherwise: Bordeaux
comprises two offerings as spaces of critical engagement. The first is a walking tour developed with the Bordeaux Colonia guidebook as a site and reference that each participant responds to, to inform how they determine a moment on the tour. The collections and exchanges on the tour, surrounding the city’s enduring colonial heritage, contemporary African presences and perennial bodies of water, inform the second (public) offering: a dinner.

Informed by a long history of the “kitchen table” concept in black feminist work and by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-1979) as a form of installation, the 3-sided dinner table of the public offering stages a symbolic yet critical engagement with the commerce triangulaire trade relationship between, Sene-Gambia, France, and the Caribbean. The table presents a non-extractive space of gathering and sharing, that acts as a framework that holds the conversation between the participants as they constellate artifacts gleaned on the 'tour' into a myriad of time-spaces and methods of situating and belonging.