Make Yourself at Home

The work you have presented in this exhibition is part of each of your broader, ongoing research on belonging in urban space. Where do homemaking practices fit in?

In 2020, I was having conversations with my cousin, Simba, who was born in New York and who’s also an architect. We were talking about how little of our training, and how little of our work professionally, actually engaged with how Black communities had agency in creating space. We both became really interested in increasing our knowledge on the diversity of ways Black people make and experience space and place.

A lot of it is kind of subversive, right? It’s working against oppressive structural systems. So, if you tell people how people are working against the system, is that really safe? But at the same time, we’re learning about each other’s spaces and each other through the same lens that stereotypes us. If you have Ghanaian heritage, and live in Co-op City (which is a very Ghanaian part of the city), how much do you know about someone of Haitian heritage who lives in East Flatbush? How often do you come into contact with them? Stereotypes have been used to justify things like underinvestment and gentrification, destroying areas and cultural heritage. What are the ways in which people have been making homes despite the status quo?

I approached it by going and speaking to people about what home, and the act of making home, was to them: cultural practices or rituals, how they engage with people to make home. There’s Gary, who lives in an apartment building. He speaks about the rents going up but the accommodation not being ideal and how they had to fight to have issues of basic maintenance, such as infestations, resolved.

One of the other interesting stories around making home was the work Julia did to landmark her street in East Flatbush. Julia was talking about how, without the landmarking, clusters of two- or three-story mid-block houses in her neighborhood have been bought, demolished, and replaced with six-plus-story condo buildings.

For me, the larger project is about queering architecture — seeing queerness as not just identity but also a way to live in and move through the world. How can queerness affect design processes? It sprang out of this initiative that I run, Queeries, asking queer architects and designers about their experiences. That has always been survey-based, more about asking questions than finding answers. The exhibition is almost like spatializing the survey.

I came into this thinking that architects know how to design a house, but not necessarily a home. Especially for queer people, home is usually a place where, broadly speaking, you can be yourself. That isn’t always where you live, or where you grew up, or anything like that. It can be the dance floor, it can be the teachers at school. There are projects and groups in New York City working on queer housing. But if you were to imagine for yourself, as a queer person, what does home mean to you, what would that look like? That’s what the workshops are about, and that’s what the postcards that get posted on the wall are about.

For me, it’s an understanding of illegality and legality in terms of how you’re expected to inhabit different kinds of spaces. The home is one, but then there’s the workplace and public space.

In our training, for myself as an interior designer, we’re not expected to understand how the law interferes with how you’re living. What protects you and what doesn’t. For undocumented immigrants, it’s very specific. A person who is considered an “illegal alien” is technically committing a crime against the state. That changes your rights in space. In your home, barriers to entry, like your front door, provide you a more nuanced right to privacy. US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can’t enter without a warrant, which is not guaranteed in other kinds of spaces, like your worksite.

The exhibition focuses on that more personal side: the spaces that people don’t generally have access to. Not the specific laws and regulations — which are complicated and are incredibly important to know, and use, and understand — but how undocumented immigrants themselves experience their space, and their life in general. We might sit here and talk about it in legal terms, but they might not consider it that way. They understand their life as what they’ve done in terms of the law, but they’ve also had to rewire how they’re thinking to exist and live in these spaces. You cannot function if you’re constantly worried or fearful.

That’s a question that came up a lot from the beginning: “Are you afraid?” And the responses were like: “Yes, but no.” The people I interviewed were helping me understand why, and how that influences how they’re making their home. There’s still ownership and agency in how they want to represent themselves. It doesn’t mean that they’re not vulnerable, but it also means that they’re allowed to express themselves however they wish. In a lot of the interviews, there’s a sadness when talking about their situation, but there’s still so much, like: “I want to talk to you because this is my life and I’m happy.”

In each of the narratives of homemaking you present, you approached ethnographic research and engagement differently. What was your process? Who did you choose to talk to, how did you go about connecting with them?

For all of us, it comes from being in that community, and growing up within those communities. It is very dangerous — for many reasons — to even reveal that you are undocumented in this country. I have very personal connections that I’ve developed over time. There needed to be trust, to know that these people weren’t going to be exposed in a way that would be harmful to them.

I told them what we study and try to understand, and why I thought their space deserved to have representation within our fields. From there, I asked: Would you allow me to come into your home and have a conversation? And then, if you’re comfortable, can we take a few photos of whatever you want us to take? And would you be comfortable with a video? Most of the walkthroughs started with them offering me something to eat, which was very kind.

I didn’t have a set of questions, I tried to guide as little as possible. The main question was just: “How did you come into this home?” Because we can all explain, “Oh, I got my apartment building through this or that.” Then, I asked: “Do you feel you’re inhabiting your space differently because of your undocumented status?” Sometimes they’d start by saying, “No, I don’t think so,” but then the conversation would keep going, and it became comfortable for them to talk about those experiences, whether they have been racialized in any way or whether they have encountered situations where they were actually afraid or they didn’t.

I am showing you the inside of these homes in a way that is supposed to preserve these spaces. Because there’s going to be a time where one of a few things is going to happen. They’re either going to have to return to their home country, or they find a pathway to citizenship, and their category changes, and those spaces begin to get lost. There are a lot of people who have been deported, and we’re never going to know what that experience was like. It just comes from trust, and knowing people, and just being transparent about what you want to try to understand.

I think the most important part about doing this work is building a relationship and trust, ensuring that the agency of people is affirmed, so they get a choice at each stage of production, and working to ensure the work is not extractive.

This project was on the more intimate size of the work I usually try to do, I usually aim to work on projects with 50 or more people, to get diversity across ethnicity, age, gender, location, socioeconomics, and migration status. There are no real prompts. I just sit with someone and say: “Tell me about your life. Where were you born? Where did you live?”

When I first started doing the Black Diasporas, we had some very directed questions; we realized we were missing out on a whole lot of information. How do we also step over lenses that are stereotyping and causing us to have certain viewpoints? What actually came out of  the more open conversation was so much richer than what was in my head.

I’m thinking, for instance, about what it takes to own a brownstone in Brooklyn: what the process is, what jobs that people who own those brownstones do. I’m expecting that if you own a brownstone, you probably have at least a six-figure job, but there’s tons of Black people who have worked together in community to be like: “Okay, how do we help you to become a homeowner?” They’ll live together, make a brownstone a two- or three-family, and then, slowly but surely, expand their property base.

I had some very stereotypical ideas about the fullness of people’s lives, which I think we all do. But people have full lives. There are things about their lives that are not good. There are things that are amazing. There’s this whole spectrum of life. Some of it is quite mundane, like catching the train.

For Q:DREAM, the process was two things. One is “research creation,” which is a term from Natalie Loveless. It’s about listening and drawing from what’s emerging from the stories to create something and understanding that whatever you create may not look like the field that you’re trying to speak to. It may not look like architecture, or like, “Here are all the data and all the graphs.” Then, a framework of queer data analysis: Dr. Kevin Guyan wrote a book about how, historically, data about queer people was through the straight person’s or straight society’s lens. Queer data goes in and starts to collect data for different purpose and starts to analyze it and show it in a “data for queers, by queers” way.

That influenced the Equitable Mad Libs exercise. It’s more about thinking about where you came from, where you are now, and where you want to be in the future. When we think about the future, it’s very much grounded in your senses, place, who you want to live with, who you see around you, what you’re experiencing. And at the very end, connecting all those very tactile things back to: What are the structures that need to change in order for those things to happen?

Were there surprises in that process? What you have been learning through the research that perhaps you didn’t expect?

I’ve learned that not a lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about their future home. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise because I haven’t really thought about it either! To actually sit down and think about that was a new experience for people and for myself. It was very interesting to hear that some people were imagining where they were already living: “Oh, I’m in a place that I’ve been dreaming up and I’m actually in it right now.” This speaks to a different narrative of queer homes and queer domesticity: sometimes it exists, and people have achieved their dream. The very last thing that surprised me was the part that asks, “What needs to change in order for this to happen?” A lot of the things that people named were like, housing needs to be more affordable or capitalism needs to be dismantled somehow. Now how do we fold this into the way that we think about architecture and design?

I can share one thing from each of the three homes that I documented. One was in affordable housing. Their bathroom had horrible conditions, water leakage everywhere. They were like, “Take photos of that, take photos of that,” because they — like a lot of people that are in affordable housing, not just undocumented persons — have these issues and no one takes care of them. In this instance, the father was very confrontational with the person in charge of their apartment, and he had no fear: “Yes, I advocate for myself: I called my representative.” It was impressive that he felt that confidence to do that for himself and have that power to go and demand things that he knew he had a right to.

At another home, it was the way the mother completely took over her living room and made it into a santuario, a little place where she had her saints, her crosses, her little manger, lights everywhere. It was beautiful. I had never seen something like that. They’re usually smaller-scale — you have a little corner, a little table reserved — but she completely took over a wall. Visually, it got people’s attention. And I think that was also the intention, to show you how unique people can be.

The other conversation was with this family who had an amazing relationship with their landlord. It’s a house that’s been divided into three separate apartments. The owner used to live there, and they developed a beautiful relationship. For me, it was unheard of. When they decided to move somewhere else, because they now have kids and they needed more space, the owner moved earth and sky to have them stay, remodeling the entire basement to their liking. They were involved in everything from choosing the flooring to where they wanted the new wall to be. She also told me that not once did the landlord ever ask them, “Hey, do you have papers?” It’s extremely hard to find housing, period. But when you don’t have that paper to back you up saying, “I am allowed to be here,” it’s nearly impossible.

All three of your projects point to powerful structures that shape our idea of home and our access to housing. If the conclusions you draw are predicated on dismantling capitalism, or ending the cruel and arbitrary criminalization of migrants, or creating cities that don’t function by shutting out Black people and practices, where do you situate design, and yourselves as designers? What connections do you hope for between your research, the audience for the exhibition, and the implications out in the world?

This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. You go through a research phase, and for me, it’s been four years. How does this actually impact design? I’m interested in this idea of agency and its spatial manifestation. How do you create spaces that people actually have the ability to change? How do you involve people in the creation of spaces? In a lot of the community consultation we have, we normally go in there with an idea of what we want to do. We’re just asking people to rubber stamp what we want to do, but we’re not super interested in how they want to live.

One of the things that was really salient was the precarity of some Black spaces. I’m trying to figure out how this information, or this process, can become a tool for self-advocacy. To be like, actually, we have stuff here. There’s just not nothing here. Most of the time, people are like, “There’s nothing here because you all don’t document it in the way that we want you to document it.”

From the beginning, Queeries was not about doing surveys or gathering data to find trends, but to get as many answers as possible, because there is no right answer. I could see this exhibition or the workshop being translated to other cities or communities. It was a lot of outreach to try to get a lot of different people, especially Brooklynites, to come to the workshop. But it could be something as hyperlocal as the LGBTQ center in Brooklyn because you get different answers each time. There could be an audience shift and that would produce different responses.

As for how it can impact architecture in the future: it’s a process-based impact. Maybe one day there’s enough space within design processes to ask people to dream together. I’m thinking about speculation of the future as a way to subvert the status quo.

We all know how important historical records are — literal documentation of situations, people, circumstances. It dictates what we can even unravel. Being allowed into these spaces creates a different kind of documentation, to prove a point beyond the technicalities of, “You don’t belong here, you don’t exist, you’re not supposed to be here.” But people are, and they deserve to have that documentation, and that historicization of their lives and what they have been through. That everyday person deserves to be recorded because this is an injustice that is happening to a large group of people and is being largely ignored. It’s been so normalized, but it shouldn’t be. Towards the end of the process, a lot of them realized, “I have a lot to say, I can teach you a lot. I am teaching you a lot.”

After hearing Karla, I’m thinking about the model minority. There are certain people whose stories we’re very keen to hear, or certain neighborhoods which we’re keen to really think about. But even in the places that have “problems,” there are full lives happening there.

I spoke about creative community approaches to homeownership because we’re talking about home. But I often try and stay away from model minority stories, which is a difficult position, and can be contradictory. People are affirming own agency, but it’s also easy to fall into the trap of not considering people who are renters.

One of the storytellers in this project was talking about how he was concerned that he had not taken advantage by buying a place when everything was cheaper in Harlem. As a society, we don’t say enough, “This is your home!” I’m trying to figure out a way that everyone can see the value they bring to making space. When you change things, you are also an owner of that space in some way.

We’re also grateful for everyone who was so willing to talk. For undocumented immigrants, so much of the time you are taught that either you’re a very strong advocate for your cause, or you just kind of fade back into the background, because that’s the way to live and interact with people so that you don’t get in trouble with the law or be at risk of deportation. I went through every photo and made sure that there was nothing that could identify them, but telling your story is still a risk.

I was speaking to a class and one of the students asked, “You want me to do the thing on the wall, and say who I am, and then a postcard, and the workshop? Isn’t that really vulnerable?” That’s the point. There’s power in vulnerability. These conversations and stories are very personal. Hopefully it gets people to listen to them, and see them, and then think critically about their role in society and what is considered the norm. I think all three of our projects start to speak about how these norms of what a home should be, or even how they should be attained, are not actual norms. They’re just the way the structures are designed now.