Franke Lectures in the Humanities

Western architecture has always been understood in terms of the body—more precisely the athletic white male body endlessly redrawn from Renaissance treatises to modern architecture manifestoes, from Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier—a perfected body immersed in geometric systems of proportions—a fiction that excludes most of humanity.

Human-centered design sounds good, but it has been terrible for humans, other species, and the planet. The human is not one thing but an endlessly complex ever changing trans-species collaboration. The human is just a bag of bacteria, and bacteria have been around for billions of years, while the human is a very recent arrival and might already be on the way out. We are nothing without all these foreigners. We live in them more than they live in us.

What would a probiotic architecture be? Probably it would be like our gut, more porous, versus the prophylactic attitude of modern architecture. We used to live intimately with all the bacteria of the soil, the plants and other animals. And we may want to reconnect with this diversity of bacteria, embracing them.

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, the Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture, and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Media and Modernity program at Princeton University. She writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality, and media and her work has been translated in more than 25 languages. Her books include Sexuality and Space (1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold (2010), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016), X-Ray Architecture (2019), and Radical Pedagogies (2022).

Poster

In this lecture, Marilyn Hacker will speak about poets, mostly writing in America, that may be considered “marginalized”—racially, ethnically, by immigration status, by gender, by sexuality, by language of origin—and the sonnet in English.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently, Calligraphies (Norton, 2023), and translator of twenty-three books by French and Francophone poets, including Samira Negrouche, Claire Malroux and Hédi Kaddour, as well as an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices. She was editor of the Kenyon Review for five years, and on the editorial collective of the French journal Siècle 21 for eight. She lives, mostly, in Paris.

Literature has always been shaped by linguistic outsiders: Jack Kerouac mostly spoke French into his teens; Joseph Conrad enlarged the British novel in his third language, after Polish and French; the most widely read book in African literature, Chinua Achebe’s English-language masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, was written by a native Igbo speaker. “Exophonic” authors have been writing the story of world literature in acquired languages from the learned Chinese verse of Nara-period Japan to the London-born Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2018 Italian novel Dove mi trovo (translated into English as “Whereabouts”).

In this hybrid poetry reading and talk, Srikanth Reddy will read from his poetry and discuss exophony and the global lyric—with reference to the April 2022 special issue of Poetry magazine on “Exophony.”

Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian (UK), the New York Times, and Poetry; and he is currently the poetry editor of the Paris Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he edits the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.

Ou Ning’s first documentary film San Yuan Li focuses on the urban village phenomenon in the process of China’s radical urbanization; it was a team effort. All the participants were amateur film lovers. They got to know each other through the U-thèque Organization founded by Ou Ning and taught themselves filmmaking during the weekend screening activities. His second documentary Meishi Street focuses on the demolishing of the street in front of Tiananmen Square and the protest of the residents prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It was also a team effort, but for the first time, Ou Ning gave a digital camera to one of the residents, Zhang Jinli, who then learned basic skills and documented his protest himself. Through egalitarian discussion and mutual learning, Ou Ning and his team—and the ordinary people they engaged with—used acquired skills to document their reality, to shape their own narratives, and to find their own voice, in a process of self-empowerment. This practice of collectivism, which encourages participation, cooperation, equal rights, and mutual learning, was later applied to the Bishan Project, a six-year rural reconstruction and placemaking project, and has been updated and extended in a series of his recent experimental projects in different places to improve the local auditory identity through soundscape studies. In this lecture Ou Ning will share the practices he has consistently honed over the past twenty years.

Ou Ning is a Chinese artist, filmmaker, curator, writer, publisher, and activist, who currently lives and works in New York. He is the director of two films, San Yuan Li (2003) and Meishi Street (2005), chief curator of the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (2009), jury member of the 8th Benesse Prize at the 2009 Venice Biennale, member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum (2011), founding chief editor of the literary bimonthly Chutzpah! (2011–14), founder of Bishan Commune (2011–16) and School of Tillers (2015–16), visiting professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (2016–17), and senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research in Boston (2019–22). His most recent book is Utopia in Practice: Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

The talk will focus on the international influence of Third Cinema (or Third World political films) in the late 1960s. I will explore the relations between the New Latin American Cinema (from Brazilian Cinema Novo to Argentinean and Bolivian militant films) and African and Arab cinema. I will also show their links with European and North American artists and filmmakers during both Cuban and Algerian cultural or film encounters at the beginning of 1968.

Mariano Mestman holds a Ph.D. in film history from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is a senior researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas (CONICET) and the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he teaches Latin American and Third World political cinema between 1950 and 1970. He has carried out research work in audiovisual archives in Canada, Cuba, France, Italy, Mexico, and Scotland.