Abstract:
My mum designs houses. She has been designing for as long as I can remember. In her youth she had aspirations to study architecture, but with race, gender, and class-based expectations against her, she didn't have a 'shit show in hell’. Her tools are simple: with a sheet of grid paper and a ball-point pen, she will conjure an elaborate home with rooms that have functions you didn't even know one needed a room to perform. By contrast her actual living space is Spartan, verging on puritan. Over the years, she has resisted many attempts by others to ‘do the place up’. She continues to resist. She likes living this way. Perhaps circumstances have influenced her aesthetic choices. One night, when I was a preschooler, we lost our home and all of our possessions in a house fire, the entire structure leveled to the ground overnight; a mass of ash and blackened timber framing. It’s possible that in response to the loss of home and all of her material wealth, my mother chose to view any subsequent homes as provisional shelters that she would inhabit only until she was able to once again live in her ideal home. Her creativity found its outlet imagining future homes, but never decorating a present one. Hers is an aesthetic of resistance; refusing to accept concrete reality as the authoritative version of her life she prefers instead to imagine a home for herself, using her own hands, realising her designs with materials she can easily access. I began this research project pondering the role of received narratives (such as this) in the construction of identity. Focusing on the construction of my identity and reflecting on the role that my familial stories have played in that process, I discuss them here through the lens of cultural critic bell hooks. In a reference to Black Vernacular in architecture, hooks describes an oppositional aesthetics, an aesthetic of resistance. Resistance to imposed judgments of taste and style, resistance to poverty and an historical legacy of oppression, resistance also to notions of material privilege as a necessity for displays of artistry and creativity. I consider also Stuart Hall’s position on race and class, and his insistence that ‘all identity is unstable, shifting, and constructed against difference’.