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Hooded figures dressed in all black moved back and forth on the University Place promenade. One passerby stopped and threw his hands up in frustration. The figures kept moving, and he decided to walk past the bodies.

The figures are a part of the “Body and Space” project, a series of installations that recognize the relationship between the bodies people are in and the spaces they occupy. Five Syracuse University architecture students curated the project, which incorporates staged interventions, or artistic interactions with a space or audience.

The series of installations have taken place at locations such as the Life Sciences building, the promenade and Columbus Circle. The project is also hosting a fashion show on Nov. 13 in collaboration with SU’s Fashion and Design Society.

Sandrine Bamba, one of the curators, called the project a “power statement” because it makes people more aware of how they interact with the spaces they take up. The intention is to bring that relationship into conversations and discuss how it has existed in history, especially in regards to race, she said.

“In terms of race relations of how you see the Black body within a specific space and how it’s perceived as maybe a threat or as other,” Bamba said. “And then pushing past that once we understand the parameters of how it’s been understood before, starting to introduce a new relationship between body and space.”

Benson Joseph, another project curator, explained that the basic idea behind the “Body and Space” project is how the notion of “othering” can be harmful when you go into the process of creating an identity.

The series of installations have taken place at locations like Syracuse University’s Life Sciences building, the promenade and Columbus Circle. Courtesy of Ashley Nowicki

“When you go into the process of creating a sense of self and identity, you indirectly are saying what you are not, and that’s how you create the notion of this person’s not like me,” Joseph said. “And then it creates the ‘us versus them,’ so that’s what we’re talking about, simply how those kinds of things are kind of crafted and created.”

The project first came to life when the SU architecture students came together this past January. Joseph sought out fellow architecture students to collaborate on the projects, and he values each individual’s skill set.

Pin Sangkaeo and Ashley Nowicki are the two other architecture students who curated the project.

In the interventions, people dressed in black clothing and hoodies personified this concept. “The team of curators chose to use the hood “as a sort of anti-power garment,” curator and SU senior Kyle Neumann said. The hood has historical connotations with hateful movements and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, but the curators are more interested in how the hood and its connotations have changed throughout history.

Neumann said that now there’s the idea that when someone puts on their hood their identity has been revoked. The idea is that viewers of the installations might start to question their own biases and how the hood makes them feel.

The “Body and Space” project aims to create a new way to have conversations about race. These interventions show how design is at the center of necessary conversations, especially since people of color are underrepresented in design fields, she said.

“The experiment itself is trying to find a different way to engage in conversation that doesn’t resolve into some extensive violence,” Joseph said. “It’s trying to find positive ways to talk about these things that we know are contested, that we know are charged, but allowing the space to be not a very conflict sort of environment.”

Published on October 28, 2020 at 11:37 pm

Contact Gavi: gavi@dailyorange.com | @gavi_azoff