While surrealism began in the 1920s, afrosurrealism, a term introduced by author Amiri Baraka, emerged in America in the 1970s. Much like surrealism, it thrives on practices that un-structure to make meaning. Inclusive in its definition of art, critic Terri Francis describes afrosurrealism as a global imaginary – taken on by writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists – for all of Africa and the diaspora.[i]
Yet, architecture and architects are surprisingly neglected in afrosurrealist discourse – why? Afrosurrealists deploy distinct spatial language – for writer Amiri Baraka, afrosurrealists trace ‘emotional places’ and for D. Scot Miller, they realise an ‘invisible world’ – the more-than-real and the truth that’s hidden in our subconscious.[ii][iii] In its rejection of objectivity, afrosurrealism locates a sensory, personal experience of space, something many architects strive to engage with in their process.
Architects and artists understand that spatialised manifestations produce alternative realities and new possibilities. For artist David Alabo, his Morrocan-Ghanaian identity informed his futuristic African landscapes and scenes, which he creates digitally.[iv] In his artwork Lust, the playful checkerboard, dreamlike pink-peach ground, and a curved, feminised body are graceful, inviting, if even, embracing. These are offset by the disembodied eyeball’s reflection in the mirror – a gaze of surprise that disturbs the serenity of the scene. The African landscape arrests and entrances. The feeling embodied by the landscape shows what Baraka, in surrealist terms, calls ‘psychological landscapes’, promoting a material world founded on the somewhat contradictory affective, lived experience.[v] Alluring and vicious, comforting and uneasy.
Lust by David Alabo
There is also an undertone of violence here, for the bodies are dismembered, literally and artistically. The torso is abruptly cut off the frame, the eyeball has wandered from a face, and the only fully formed person appears rigid, formed by brass-like material – even they too are unrepresented: reflected in the mirror, but not fully present in the scene. We are left with an image of displacement: a not-quite-at-home with fractured bodies in a dystopian African landscape.
Afrosurrealists are determined to address the violence that proliferates everyday black life – ‘black’ here being an inclusive racial term that encompasses multiple marginalised identities in Africa and the diaspora. Architectural forms mediate these daily encounters. In South Africa, the legacies of spatial segregation and inequality continue to frame everyday life in the city. We may take, for example, the way red bricks are a reminder of apartheid: at water infrastructure plants around the country, the old buildings carry this memory of the previous regime. The architects at the Cape Town based firm, Stewart and Partners, discovered this during their upgrade projects around the country. When they spoke to water plant operators, who are all people of colour, it became clear that red brick would not be a viable material for the upgrades, as operators expressed that this would be a stark reminder of the oppressive regime. The staff were integral in the choice to build with new materials – and so, at Zandvliet Wastewater Treatment Works, satin brick was chosen for the floating wall with concrete and glass carefully designed to give the site a new personality for the democratic era.
Steenbras Water Treatment Plant by Cape Town Archive
Zandvliet Wastewater Treatment Works by Courtesy of Stewart and Partners
‘Afrosurrealism is about the NOW,’ D. Scot Miller writes in his manifesto.[vi] And yet, in many countries like South Africa, moving into the future brings a contention with the past. This what Miller calls the ‘future-past’: an acknowledgement that newness necessitates a response to what came before.[vii] Memories, stored in the built environment – in materials as ordinary as a brick – are recognised in this framework.
Afrosurrealism has proven to be a successful pedagogical and methodological approach, which architects in the North have explored. In 2017, Professors Scott Ruff and Jeffrey Hogrefe led the Gullah Geechee Studio at Yale University and then in 2020, at the Pratt Institute. The third-year architecture graduate students were introduced to afrosurrealism as a liberatory practice, through which they approached their sites: either their own or the assigned locations of South Carolina/Georgia Sea Islands and Charleston S.C. – places that are home to the Gullah Geechee people who possess ‘an African American maroon culture’.[viii] With the Gullah Geechee homeplace undergoing gentrification, afrosurrealism became a means for students to acknowledge ‘multiple realities’.[ix]
The students, in response, designed recreational centres, maps, collages, and models. Final-year student Joshua Kooper at the Pratt Institute presented a provocative series of collages entitled YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND, a visceral reaction to his chosen site, an automotive plant in Detroit. The presentation is saturated with rage and grief; it ‘created a narrative of Afrosurrealism that incorporates unlikely juxtapositions of images of a mythic Detroit in a state of revolution together with a conjuring map of the red ants and the African American person emerging from a besieged condition in a new ecology’.[x] Its architectural forms – unmade, partial, become intertwined with the pain of the black experience.
YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND: AI TO AI by Joshua Cooper
Here, we see that collage brings the opportunity for architecture to accept afrosurrealism into practice. With several researchers advocating for its use in design and research, architecture and collage are close companions. In Collage and Architecture by Jennifer Shields, she explains that architects like Le Corbusier saw collage practices as essential to architectural work and this manifests, in the built form, as a ‘collage attitude’.[xi] (Afro)surrealism may then readily infiltrate architecture through disassembling practices of collage. It is yet another means of taking apart and reassembling to access the subconscious, ‘invisible world’.
Multimedia artist Chelle Barbour, who employs an afrosurrealist approach, explores African American identity through radical portraits. Chelle, in her artistic statement, explains that architectural elements are layered in the images.[xii] In a portrait, a hand turns into a hat, appearing like a roof to shelter a face. In another, the face is centred as a spatialised object, embodying a subverted gaze, indirect but confident, its cutout swings off creating a new decorative form. While Chelle Barbour’s collage brings architectural forms to the body, the reverse is also true – architecture must understand the body in the space – and, as far as possible, its elusive inner workings: memories, emotion, and internalised systems.
Collage from Women of the Diaspora by Chelle Barbour
[i] Terri Francis, ‘Close-Up: Afrosurrealism: Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism’, Black Camera, An International Film Journal, 5, no.1 (2013), 97.
[ii] Amiri Baraka, ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’, Black American Literature Forum, 22, no.2 (1988), 164.
[iii] D. Scot Miller, ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New black—a 21st-Century Manifesto’, Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013), 116.
[iv] Russel Hlongwane, ‘Black Mirrors and Afro-Surrealism with David Alabo’, Contemporary, And, 17 June 2020, accessed 20 December 2024, https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/black-mirrors-and-afro-surrealism/.
[v] Baraka, ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’, 165.
[vi] Miller, ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto’, 114.
[vii] Miller, ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto’, 114.
[viii] Jeffrey Hogrefe and Scott Ruff, ‘Creative Practices in Afrosurrealism within a North American Context’ in Harriet Harris, Ashraf M. Salama, Ane Gonzalez Lara (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South (Oxford: Routledge, 2023), 454.
[ix] Hogrefe and Ruff, ‘Creative Practices in Afrosurrealism,’ 454.
[x] Hogrefe and Ruff, ‘Creative Practices in Afrosurrealism,’ 461.
[xi] Jennifer Shields, Collage and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2023), 212.
[xii] ‘Juxtaposing Afro-surrealism’ ‘CHELLE BARBOUR/Juxtaposing Afro-surrealism’, Granary Arts, accessed 20 December 2024, https://www.granaryarts.org/chelle-barbour-juxtaposing-afrosurrealism.
