Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: For me, Mumbai has always been a working-class city. That’s its defining character. Any city that grows because people come there to work develops certain things: functional public transport, cheap food, spaces you can access without feeling excluded. Rent is expensive, of course, but life around you feels reachable. That accessibility shaped my childhood. I was constantly out—taking buses and trains on my own by age eight or nine. That kind of mobility gives you agency that stays with you, especially for a girl in India (fig. 1).

I also grew up in a very political home. My parents are Ambedkarite, Marxist, anti-caste people who fought hard for their education, and their politics shaped everything in our house. My family has been in Mumbai for a couple of generations, so our relationship to the city is deep. Even with the gentrification happening now, it is still hard for me to be angry at Mumbai. There was a time when the city felt like it was truly ours. We could sit by the sea, go to the aquarium, the museum, the planetarium. My parents took me everywhere, and that exposure shaped me into someone who is always thinking and asking questions.

Mumbai also gave me a visual language. It did not come from galleries, because there were not many accessible ones then. It came from the trains, the sea, the political culture of Maharashtra, the literary tradition of essays, theater, poetry, and also from the vibrance of the music we grew up with. There was a kind of freedom in those moments, even if it was never fully available to Dalit girls in the same way. That tension between what we desire and what we can access has shaped how I look at the world.

MV: You were also growing up during an intense political moment in the city, with violence unfolding around you while the country projected a very different public narrative. As your political commitments deepened, how did this dissonance shape your sense of responsibility as an artist? 

SNS: I was born in 1992, so all the politics of that time were simply the atmosphere of my childhood. Babri happened shortly after I was born, the Bombay riots happened right after, and the 1990s and early 2000s were ripe with bomb blasts and communal tension.¹ It became normal for us. You would be waiting for a train or a bus, hear that a blast happened somewhere else in the city, and then you would just go home. Everyone who grew up in Mumbai in the ’90s lived with that kind of violence.

At the same time, mainstream media kept presenting a very liberal idea of unity and diversity. Those were the images painted everywhere, even though the reality around us was completely different. When I think about it now, it feels absurd that this is what we accepted as normal. But that environment shaped how I thought about culture and what it means to make something that cannot be twisted or misunderstood later. 

As someone from a marginalized community, I’m never only an artist. I’m always thinking about the past that shaped my family, the present I’m trying to make sense of, and the future I want to help build. My work has to hold all of that. That’s why I don’t respond immediately to events around me. My practice needs time to research, to understand what already exists, and to be intentional about how I represent myself and my community.

I also know now that I am someone who needs to be liberated. I’m part of the community I’m speaking from. For me to work honestly, I have to understand what my own body carries: my grandmother’s experiences, my sisters’ experiences, my friends’ experiences. All of that moves through me, and processing it takes time. I’m always thinking about posterity. I don’t want a future where culture looks back at us and gets it wrong. I can’t control how the present sees us, but by making the work I make, I’m putting something into the present that I hope the future will understand clearly. There should be no mistake.

MV: I’d like to turn to the portraits in your new series Educate, which takes these questions around representation into the lives and lineages of Dalit women. How did that project begin, and what does “educate” mean for you in this context?

SNS: Educate is the first part of a three-part series I began about a year and a half ago. The title comes from the first word in [the slogan] Shika, sanghatit vha ani sangharsh kara—which is usually translated as “educate, agitate, organize.”² But shika is often misunderstood, and it actually means “learn.” “Educate” in English can sound like teaching others, but I’m thinking about learning in a much broader sense: the knowledge systems Dalit communities have built, the violence students have endured, and the determination with which they continue to pursue education. I’m not trying to glorify that struggle; I’m trying to understand what this pursuit of knowledge has meant over a very long time.

For us, learning has always been taken seriously as a way out of poverty and caste oppression. Even if literacy rates are lower than the national average, the numbers themselves are remarkable given what people have been put through. Culturally, there is a very specific emphasis on education. At our events, there are always books, pamphlets, translations. At Chaityabhoomi on December 6, people spend their hard-earned money on literature and art.³ These are things supposedly meant for the elite, yet everyone wants to learn something—or at least to hold onto that aspiration.

All of this brought me to Mukta Salve (fig. 3). In 1855, when she was only 14, she wrote “About the Grief of the Mahars and Mangs” in the Marathi journal Dnyanodaya. It’s one of the earliest published anti-caste texts by a Dalit girl. The essay is painful, but it’s also full of a sharp awareness that education is the only way out of enslavement. Ambedkar repeated her points about half a century later. So for me, Educate has to begin with Mukta Salve.

MV: Instead of depicting Salve directly, you’ve chosen to paint her “descendants,” the people in her intellectual and political lineage. How did that idea take shape for you?

SNS: When I looked at the few visuals that exist of Mukta Salve, there’s really just this one image that circulates. And it doesn’t sit right with me. Beautiful as it is, it feels like it’s coming directly from the lineage of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)—those soft, “divine” upper-caste aesthetics rooted in colonial art pedagogy. Ravi Varma painted women from oppressor-caste households into these ethereal, gentle embodiments of “sacredness,” and those images went on to define what an “ideal Indian woman” or “goddess” looked like (fig. 4). That visual language wasn’t built from our lives; it was built from theirs.

So when I look at that image of Mukta Salve, it doesn’t feel connected to who she might have been, or what she wrote, or the conditions she was writing from. It’s an aesthetic that isn’t ours. I did think for a moment, “Should I try to paint her?” But what would be the point of that? For me to sit here and imagine her face… I don’t know what that activity does or what it gives to the work, or to us as a culture.

I instead began thinking about Dalit women and girls who are pursuing education now—the people who are carrying her legacy forward. And I wanted the portraits to be a space of release for them, not a re-creation of a historical figure we can’t accurately imagine. That’s how I started painting my friend Divya, who is doing her PhD in New York (fig. 5). The titles themselves will hold that connection between her and Salve, something like Divya in lieu of Mukta Salve, or Mukta Salve’s Divya. The two women are tied together in the work—not visually but conceptually. Divya becomes a way of thinking about what Mukta Salve made possible and what it means for Dalit women to pursue knowledge today.

MV: In the portrait of Divya, the pose of rest feels central. Rest has a very specific lineage in Western portraiture, often idealized through the bourgeoisie. How were you thinking about rest in this context?

SNS: Divya wasn’t posing at all. I spent the day with her, waiting to see when she would finally stop moving. And, at one point, she just sat down. If you look closely, there’s a scowl on her face. It’s not rest. It’s a five-minute break in a full day of labor. That moment is important because portraiture usually puts something on a pedestal: dignity, beauty, power. Here, I wanted to put that tiny, vulnerable pause on a pedestal. That’s the release I’m talking about.

The patterns in the painting do specific work too. The couch pattern comes from the crops grown on Divya’s family’s land. They are literally what she rests on, generationally and materially. The blanket is the exact sari her mother wears in a photo Divya showed me. Divya doesn’t like keeping direct references to her home because the distance becomes too painful, so I brought her mother in indirectly, through pattern. Because her mother is central to Divya’s rest.

And the vulnerability of her pose exists only because of my relationship with her. This is based on a photograph, not a sitting. If she were sitting for me, the softness would disappear, and it would become labor again. That’s why it matters that she wasn’t performing. She was simply tired. And my work is to take that moment and magnify it.

MV: When I visited your studio, you were also working on a portrait of a woman in a bathtub. It felt like a very different kind of scene—still intimate, but coming from another set of questions. Could you talk about what you’re exploring there?

SNS: Yes. That portrait is still very unresolved. It’s of my friend Hrithik, who’s doing her PhD in Minneapolis (fig. 6). She had just moved to the US, and we were talking about how suddenly you have bathtubs everywhere. In India, you don’t. A bathtub is such an aspiration— a marker of “you’ve made it.” And then we started talking about bubble baths—how much guilt there is because of the water, and how strange it feels to allow yourself that kind of pleasure. And from there, we were talking about what we allow ourselves as Dalit women, and what we don’t.

She’s very young. And right now, she’s in this moment of “I’ll do whatever I want. I’m going to have fun. I don’t care what anyone says.” And that takes a long time to arrive at. It might look like normal “young person behavior,” but for her it’s new. She has become young now. That also happened to me—I came into my youth when I was older. When I was younger, I wasn’t young. So for her, this portrait is about exercising agency, claiming the right to live her life as a young person, on her own terms. And for me, it’s also the first time I’m painting someone in this context.

MV: That question of agency feels connected to what you were saying earlier about the series as a whole. Not just rest, but how Dalit women navigate their own representational constraints. How does that come through in this portrait? 

SNS: All of these portraits are not only about repose. They’re also about morality and respectability politics, and how those things get imposed on Dalit women’s bodies. Shailaja Paik writes about this: the way Dalit womanhood, through the anti-caste movement, starts to carry an imposed masculinity.⁴ We become bodies that are supposed to represent endurance, sacrifice, honor. You never want your body to trigger the tabooed memories of the kinds of labor Dalit women were historically forced into. And that’s a huge burden, because that same body also has desires, sexuality, pleasure. But you cannot express that. You cannot be playful. That’s what we mean when we say, “I didn’t get to be young when I was younger.” Within the anti-caste movement, there is so much respectability politics. Someone will always say: “This is not how someone from our community behaves. You represent serious things, so you must always be serious.” There is no space to be fully human.

And you know, it’s uncomfortable for me too. There are moments when I’m painting and I think, “What am I doing?” These women are simply feeling something, and it doesn’t look overtly political. It doesn’t look radical. But there is a radical edge to it. While I paint, my body has to stay aware of that tension—not only the need to challenge Brahminical patriarchy and Brahminical supremacy, but also the need to challenge ourselves. Art cannot just make us feel represented. It can’t only give us images of Dalit women that confirm what we already know. It also has to push us to ask, “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”

As someone shaped by the anti-caste movement, I have to ask whether I am ready to tolerate women from my community enjoying themselves. Because the moment Dalit women experience pleasure or softness, it’s dismissed as frivolous or unserious. And that dismissal sits on top of generations of emotional, physical, and intellectual labor carried disproportionately by Dalit women. They have carried entire communities, yet are not afforded their own humanity. That’s the challenge this series is trying to hold. If you had told me four months ago that I would be painting someone in a bubble bath as part of Educate, I wouldn’t have believed you. It feels wild. Because the histories around education for Dalit communities are full of violence—the use of water against us, the violence in schools and universities, the experiences of Dalit students navigating institutions designed not to include them. Those histories shape what we imagine “education” is supposed to look like, and you wouldn’t expect these portraits from that imagination. 

MV: Especially when you place them in the lineage of Salve’s writing.

SNS: Exactly. To then say Mukta Salve’s Hrithik—that is an immense claim. And yet while the rest of us are tense, she is there, having the bubble bath she deserves. She is in bliss. 

MV: Which was the point of Salve’s writing—to carve out the right to live differently.

SNS: This is what I mean when I say my work is about creating the moments we want in the future, in the present. If the goal is equity—that all of us get to enjoy our lives—then shouldn’t we say that we deserve that enjoyment now? That’s the dialogue happening in my head while I make this portrait. 

MV: Alongside these portraits, you’re also making an installation for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that comes out of Educate and its focus on water, violence, and learning. How did that work grow out of the same questions?

SNS: Last spring, as I was thinking about different aspects of Educate, I started thinking about how water has been used as a weapon and a tool of segregation against Dalit students (fig. 7). Shailaja Paik also writes about this in her work on Dalit women’s education—how, when the British tried to include oppressed castes in schooling, caste Hindus were furious. Their main argument was that if their children studied with us and drank water in the same spaces, their children would be polluted. Water became the most contested site.⁵

And it continues. There was a case recently of a boy who drank from his principal’s bottle and was beaten. There was Indra Meghwal, a little child in Rajasthan who drank from the common source in school and was beaten to death by his teacher.⁶ I was thinking about the violence that water holds, of water as an archive. I was also thinking about Ambedkar’s experiences in school—No peon, no water—where he could only drink if a school official (peon) poured water for him from a height, and if that person didn’t come, he had no water. Water is the site of humiliation and the site of resistance. After Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s legendary Mahad Satyagraha in March 1927 at Chavdar Tank, the local caste Hindus were infuriated and decided to “purify” the water using panchgavya (a mixture of cow urine, cow dung, milk, ghee, and curd). Polluting the water in this way was preferred to the mere thought of human beings from a different caste touching it.⁷ An infuriated Dr. Ambedkar decided to burn the Manusmriti shortly after, on December 25, 1927, at Mahad.⁸

Inspired by this, I wanted to use that same material, water, to destroy the Manusmriti. I started working with unfired clay tiles, roughly A4 or letter size, so they read as “documents.” I went through the Manusmriti and picked verses that specifically talk about education and what should happen if someone from an oppressed caste dares to study, what punishments are prescribed. It was a very painful process to read and select those texts.

I developed these slabs and began printing the verses on them with henna, using a screen-printing process on the wet clay so the text would be very clean and legible. Then I built an installation where water slowly drips onto the tiles (fig. 8). As it keeps dripping, the text dissolves, the clay collapses, and it literally turns to mud.

I also made the tiles as a walkway (fig. 9). You have to step on them to enter the space. It feels like stepping on dry leaves—there’s this very soothing, ASMR-like cracking sound. It’s calming. You hear the water dripping, you feel this relief in your body. And then you look down and read what you’re stepping on, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s the experience I wanted: the calm and the violence arriving together, in your body.

Over time, as people keep stepping, the text becomes less legible. I’m completely okay with that. In fact, I think some of these texts should never be archived. They should not exist. I don’t need to give you evidence of the atrocity; the fact that I had to create them just to destroy them should tell you enough. And this is coming from someone who cares deeply about archives, who loves holding on to pieces of history. The work at Kochi via Conflictorium displays only the walkway tiles on a 6 by 10-foot floor space.

MV: You’ve talked about wanting people to encounter this installation alongside the portraits from Educate. How do you imagine that relationship between stepping on the tiles and then seeing these images of Divya and Hrithik?

SNS: I’ve been thinking about the tiles and the portraits as two different but connected bodies of work. Any time someone wants to access the work in Educate and the portraits of rest, bliss, and release, I want them to do this act of stepping on the Manusmriti first. You shouldn’t be able to just walk in and enjoy the leisure of Dalit women without confronting what has been done to us. The tiles become a threshold, and you have to embody that act of destruction at least once. We have done this kind of work—a thousand times over, in a hundred different ways—before we allow ourselves a moment of rest. So as a viewer, at the very least, you have to do this much. 

And, as an artist, I also have to be careful not to reproduce that violence endlessly. The water only needs to be poured once. I don’t want to spend my life making and remaking these tiles so that they can be destroyed over and over. As much as it gives me pleasure to destroy the Manusmriti, I also have to liberate myself. 

The post “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”: Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar in Conversation with Maya Varma; Part I appeared first on post.

In March 2025, members of the C-MAP Southeast and East Asia Group visited Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi. In Vietnam, we met the curator Van Do, who served as one of our interlocutors, joining us on visits to museums, galleries, and studios. Her essay “Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the “New Socialist Human” stems from this engagement.

With red scarves knotted at our necks, we gather in rows every Monday morning before class for the weekly flag-raising ritual. Beneath the national flag, members of the ceremonial team, dressed in red-and-white uniforms and wearing hats shaped like bamboo shoots perched on their heads, beat drums and crash cymbals fiercely, as we sing along to the national anthem. At its close, we respond in unison: “For the socialist homeland, for the great ideal of Uncle Hồ: Ready!” In every classroom, the Five Teachings of Uncle Hồ hang neatly beside the blackboard (usually on the right side): “Love your Fatherland, love the people. Study well, work well. Unite well, discipline well. Keep good hygiene. Be honest, brave, and modest.” After school, following the instructions of Uncle Hồ, we rally quickly in the schoolyard for collective physical exercise. Outside the classrooms, storytelling contests about Uncle Hồ, revolutionary heroes, or moral lessons; theatrical reenactments of historical events; and the collection of scrap materials for “small plan campaigns” to raise funds for the school and instill environmentally conscious habits become endearing rituals of discipline in camaraderie.

More than simply school routine, such rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human”¹, laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Beyond our formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into our leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. I spent the summer of 2004, when I was nine, at the Children’s Palace learning to read music and how to play the organ. Ten years later, in 2024, I revisited these childhood memories when alongside Le Thuan Uyen and Pham Minh Hieu, I approached the Palace as curator of Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the Future.² Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.³ 

Mass singing and choral performances, often of revolutionary or patriotic songs—especially those expressing love for “Uncle” Hồ Chí Minh—once filled the music classrooms of the Children’s Palace. I can still hum and recall the dance steps to “Last Night I Dreamed of Uncle Hồ” and sing along to “Who Loves Uncle Hồ Chí Minh More than Teenagers and Children?” Written by composer Phong Nhã after his visit to the Palace in 1945, the latter song encapsulates a moment of nation-building, one coinciding with Vietnam’s declaration of independence from French colonial rule and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The layered history of the Hanoi Children’s Palace can be traced back to the 1930s, when the site first served as a kindergarten during the French colonial era. Later, in 1946, it was taken over by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and transformed into the headquarters of the Young Pioneer Organization—a central institution during the resistance against French colonialism for mobilizing children, adolescents and young adults, and for organizing cultural activities. Under different names and in varied form, this political mission continued throughout the anti-American war until national reunification following the Geneva Agreements in 1954.

In 1974, with support from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in the spirit of Soviet-bloc solidarity, the original French structure was converted into a six-story complex featuring signature perforated concrete sunshades and the Red Scarf Theatre. The building was designed by architect Lê Văn Lân (born 1938), a graduate of the first Architecture and Construction cohort of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (fig. 1). Lê Văn Lân’s career spanned leadership positions in urban-planning agencies, a residency in Moscow focused on urban planning (1961), and advanced training in the German Democratic Republic in cultural architecture (1968–72).

Lê Văn Lân’s trajectory situated him within transnational socialist architectural discourse, in which rational urban planning, collectivist functions, and the civic role of public institutions were intertwined. The Hanoi Children’s Palace was therefore not a singular project but rather part of a broader network of cultural-educational infrastructures dedicated to shaping the socialist subject. The architect’s immersion in Eastern bloc urbanism and institutional design likely reinforced his conviction in architecture’s formative power—to spatialize ideology, discipline the senses, and stage a future-oriented collectivity—as a means to help build a new socialist country and contribute to the renewal of a nation devastated by war.

The name “Hanoi Children’s Palace” was adopted in 1985; prior to that, the institution was known as the Children’s Cultural House (1975–85) and the Children’s Club (before 1975). This renaming in the 1980s was likely intended to align with the nomenclature used across socialist nations, while also asserting the ideological role of the institution. The very concept of a “children’s palace” originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–30s with the Palaces of the Young Pioneers (Дворец пионеров)—extracurricular centers where children engaged in sports, arts, science, and ideological education. 

From the 1950s onward, this model spread throughout the socialist world—in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and allied countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, children’s palaces and youth cultural houses became urban landmarks and emblems of socialist modernity. In China, they proliferated from the 1950s under Maoist ideology, with many still operating today. North Korea monumentalized the model with the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace in Pyongyang (built in 1989). In Cuba, the Ernesto Che Guevara Children’s Palace (Palacio de Pioneros Ernesto Che Guevara) opened in 1979 as a large-scale extracurricular center combining ideological education, vocational training, and cultural, technical, and athletic programs for young students.

In Hanoi, three major institutions—the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the Youth Cultural Centre, and the Hanoi Children’s Palace—remain architectural traces of a socialist ambition to cultivate the citizens of the future, each corresponding to a different stage of subject formation: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and the working masses. The architecture of these institutions localized socialist aesthetics through modernist planning, multifunctional public spaces, and symbolic ornamentation. In Vietnam, Hanoi Children’s Palace continues to operate under the administration of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union. Established following the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930, the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union was formalized in 1931 as a socio-political organization responsible for youth education, mobilization, and cadre formation. Operating under Party leadership, the Union functions as a key intermediary between the state and young people, combining political training with cultural, artistic, and social activities.

Despite their continued operation, the civic-educational functions of these institutions have significantly eroded; these spaces have increasingly shifted toward ideologically neutral cultural-commercial programming. Under the pressures of neoliberal marketization, the architecture of collective dreams—once overflowing with optimism for a socialist future—has deteriorated. It now not only competes with an expanding landscape of private arts, sports, and educational facilities, but also is facing the risk of appropriation if not outright demolition.

For generations of children who came of age after the war, me included, the Hanoi Children’s Palace endures as a tender repository of childhood memory. On my first site visit to the Palace, which coincided with its 69th anniversary, observed under the title Bầy chim về tổ (A Flock of Birds Returning to Its Nest), a group of Palace alumni—now in their sixties and seventies—performed on the stage of the Red Scarf Theatre. They sang the same songs they had performed in their youth. Beneath airy corridors and patterned concrete sunshades shimmering in the sunlight, childhood was celebrated through collective play, reverie, performances, and long, exhilarating hours of creative learning.

Held from November 9–17, 2024, Nostalgia for the Future was a curatorial project that unfolded within the three buildings that make up the Hanoi Children’s Palace: Ấu Trĩ Viên (or Childhood Institute), the six-story classroom building, and the Red Scarf Theatre, expanding into an exhibition that spanned indoor and outdoor spaces, public programs, and playgrounds. In this essay, I focus on Nguyễn Trần Nam (born 1979)’s “We Never Fall” (2010), Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên (born 1993)’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” (2024), and Nguyễn Huy An (born 1982)’s Vowels series (2014–24) to examine how each of these works entangles socialist memory with the political role of pedagogy, while probing the possibilities of art to intervene in and reinterpret an ideological pedagogical project that has long receded. Here, “nostalgia” is not sentimental longing; instead, it names a stance that acknowledges the discipline, violence, and psychic residues of socialist education, along with its broader politico-ideological ambition to forge the “new socialist human,” and the ways in which this past continues to inscribe itself in the present. By reintroducing and recontextualizing contemporary artworks within a site once instrumentalized for political pedagogy, the curatorial gesture confronts and reshapes socialist legacies, enabling the Children’s Palace to assume a new role (albeit for only nine fleeting days) as a space for artistic and curatorial intervention—as an attempt to write into its history before the uncertain future overtakes it.

The Red Scarf Theatre—a 500-seat auditorium with recessed, starlike ceiling lights that sits on the right side of the classroom building—once hosted hundreds of thousands of performances, from ballets and dramatic productions to music competitions for children across the country. It now became the stage for Nguyễn Trần Nam’s “We Never Fall” (fig. 2). Five life-size composite sculptures resembling Russian balance dolls stood silently in the dim hall. The work drew on the lật đật (balance doll or Nevalyashka (Неваляшка) which means “one that never falls”). The lật đật was a familiar imported toy that was brought to Vietnam in the 1960s–80s through Soviet and Eastern European aid and trade. It circulated among generations of children and students studying abroad at the time.

Each of the dolls, modeled after the artist’s family members, represents a role within socialist Vietnam: the peasant, the teacher, the worker, the student, and the artist—a symbolic taxonomy of laboring, disciplinary, and creative bodies mobilized to visualize the socialist “collective subject.” Installed within the Red Scarf Theatre, the work took on a fictive dramaturgy: four dolls occupied the position of the former orchestra pit, facing an empty audience, as one doll—the student wearing a red scarf—waited in the wings.

The roly-poly mechanism—righting itself each time it is pushed over—embodied resilience and stability, yet this very capacity to endure revealed its paradox: an endless return that hardens into rigidity, a self-operating system that survives by refusing transformation. Are we the ones doing the pushing, or have we already been absorbed into a programmed movement? Are we watching them perform their choreographed gestures, are they watching us in return? The scene unfolded as a meditation on socialist pedagogy—on discipline, observation, and the suspension of action—in which resilience becomes indistinguishable from resistance to change, and a collective is trained to watch, to wait, and to return, again and again, to its predetermined place.

Behind the wings of the Red Scarf Theatre, another “stage” was concealed within a former dressing room, where Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” quietly asserted a commanding presence (fig. 3).⁴ The work took the form of a monumental sculpture: a basin of Hồng Hà violet ink—shaped like the traditional lectern found in public school classrooms across Vietnam—paired with a set of distorted stainless-steel fountain pens poised above but not touching the liquid surface. For generations of students in Northern Vietnam, Hồng Hà violet was the compulsory ink used in grades one through six; children were taught to write only with the right hand and to follow the Latin alphabet. At the Children’s Palace, as in schools nationwide, “penmanship contests”—in which award-winning handwriting featured immaculate proportions, precisely measured letter spacing, balanced strokes of thin and thick lines, a calibrated tilt, and rhythmically connected curves—reflected prolonged disciplinary training. Discipline here was not simply correct posture or repetitive practice—it also came with punishment. How many generations remember the sharp crack of a wooden ruler across the palm for messy writing, wrong stroke order, left-handedness, or the failure to memorize a lesson?

In socialist pedagogy, discipline and punishment “naturalized” violence through repetition, surveillance, and self-control, echoing the proverb that frames strictness as affection: Thương cho roi cho vọt, ghét cho ngọt cho bùi (roughly, “Those who love discipline with the rod and the whip; those who hate offer sweetness and indulgence”). Such a saying becomes an alibi for coercion. In Thuỷ Tiên’s work, this history has been materialized as bodily, edging toward exhaustion—hovering between physical and psychological fatigue. The word “eyelid” (mi mắt) in the title becomes an extended metaphor—a thin, trembling threshold between alertness and rest, discipline and collapse.

A trio of works by Nguyễn Huy An, produced over the span of a decade—“A à ” (2014), “Musical Notes” (2023), and “Music Notations” (2024)—was installed across two locations within the Children’s Palace: the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room (where Hồ Chí Minh signed the Preliminary Agreement with the French on March 6, 1946) and the drum-and-trumpet rehearsal room of the former Ấu Trĩ Viên, where the Young Bamboo Shoot ceremonial team still practices weekly. As with many of Huy An’s projects, this constellation of works operates simultaneously as performance and conceptual installation. Though produced ten years apart, they resonate as variations on a shared impulse: dismantling the visual and sonic architectures of socialist propaganda and returning them to their raw, pre-ideological forms.

In “A Ă Â,” the artist extracted all 29 letters of the Vietnamese alphabet and five Vietnamese tone marks from faded or partially destroyed propaganda slogans painted on the walls of cultural houses across Northern provinces outside of Hanoi (fig. 4). Painstakingly isolating each character, Huy An reframed them individually, stripping them back to a neutral, emptied state, prior to reassembling them into words, meaning, and ideology. Made of layered lime paint, these slogans accumulate over time: new ones are painted over old, then crack, chip, and erode, leaving overlapping fragments of what once lay beneath. Some letters remain decipherable; others are broken, orphaned, or illegible, severed from any coherent phrase. For the Children’s Palace, Huy An retained only the 12 vowels (A, Ă, Â, E, Ê, I, O, Ô, Ơ, U, Ư, Y) and five Vietnamese tone marks, placing them high up against an aged wall like remnants of a bygone propagandistic past.

In Huy An’s live performance as part of “4th Quarter Report” (Á Space, 2023), in which the work “Musical Notes” first appeared, the artist carried a bundle of bronze bars as he walked out before the audience.⁵ He slowly scattered the bars across the floor while reciting a poem that begins, “In two-four time and the marching rhythm / March to Hanoi – March to Saigon / I count” (fig. 5). He then proceeded to count aloud the 255 musical notes that make up two songs, both of which are often broadcast as “victory anthems” through public loudspeakers on national commemorative days: “Tiến về Sài Gòn” (“March to Saigon”) by Huỳnh Minh Siêng, is played on April 30 in honor of the reunification of South Vietnam, and “Tiến về Hà Nội” (“March to Hanoi”) by Văn Cao, is played on October 10 to mark the liberation of the capital from French colonial rule. Once considered triumphant, celebratory, and bound to historic moments of liberation, these songs—repeated year after year until their glory erodes—are, here, stripped of narrative and affect, in effect reduced to abstract sonic objects.

After counting, Huy An concluded: “The sum of two marches / plus nine single rests, / amounts to 255 tones.” The 255 notes are thus reduced to a simple numerical sequence, then translated into bronze bars capable of producing sound. At the end of the performance, the artist struck the bar corresponding to the note G (sol). Exhibited later as a museological artifact in the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room—surrounded by archival photographs and documents—the bronze bars lie neatly on a long table draped in dark green velvet, assuming a solemn presence that confronts the persistence of ideology as it is ritualized into everyday life (figs. 6, 7).

In “Musical Notations,” public monuments across Hanoi have been transformed into musical instruments: the Martyrs’ Monument in Vạn Xuân Park (Quán Thánh district), the Martyrs’ Monument in Bà Kiệu Temple Square, the Martyrs’ Monument in the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the statue of King Lý Thái Tổ, the statue of painter Victor Tardieu at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, monuments to Alexandre Yersin and José Martí Péréz, the Lenin Monument in Lenin Park, monuments to Nguyễn Trãi and Emperor Quang Trung, the statue of Saint Paul at Xanh Pôn Hospital, and the Nguyễn Văn Trỗi monument at West Lake, among others. By striking each monument with a hammer and recording their resonant echoes, Huy An produced a series of “notations” that collapses symbolic hierarchies: socialist heroes, ancient kings, foreign intellectuals, and anticolonial figures are all reduced to the acoustic materiality of hammered stone and metal—later transcribed into onomatopoeic words. Monuments to martyrs, emperors, and revolutionaries are symbolically leveled, leaving behind nothing but the sound of matter.

Across the three works in Huy An’s “Vowels” series, a process of deconstruction has transpired: letters, musical notes, and monuments have each been returned to elemental form. In their transition, the works invite us to consider how political symbols might be released from ideological function and returned to the realm of pure sensory encounter, open to potential poetic reassembly beneath a sky that seems anything but new.

Rather than treating the Hanoi Children’s Palace as a neutral site for artistic display, Nostalgia for the Future engaged it as a historical apparatus—a space designed to enact socialism as a performative project, in which the “new socialist human” is not merely imagined but continuously produced through education, discipline, collective ritual, and bodily training. Within this context, nostalgia is not about singing the same old songs or indulging in sentimental recollections of the past. Instead, it operates as a critical stance—one that acknowledges both the emancipatory promises and the disciplinary violence embedded in socialist pedagogy as well as interrogates how socialist ideals were rehearsed, normalized, and internalized through everyday bodily practices.

The works discussed here do not simply reference this legacy; they position themselves in relation to it, testing what remains operative, what has failed, and what continues to structure subjectivity in the present. While reactivating pedagogical residues and recalling lived histories, the project orchestrated nostalgia as a critical field of strategies through which artists perform, rehearse, distort, or refuse inherited pedagogical forms and socialist values. Nguyễn Trần Nam draws on his own familial memories to question socialist ambition by unsettling its symbols through intimate and playful engagement. Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên, by contrast, approaches nostalgia as an embodied and affective residue, foregrounding how socialist education persists not only as ideology but also as somatic memory—in posture, endurance, sensation, and affect. For Nguyễn Huy An, nostalgia takes the form of a quiet, destructive poetics, a subtractive process in which structures and symbols are gradually eroded and rendered fragile, opening them to semantic and sonic reconfiguration.

At the center of the Children’s Palace complex lies an open courtyard that once functioned as a space for collective activity and play. Here, gym classes and group exercise took place, parents and grandparents waited to collect their children, and brass bands rehearsed their repertoire (fig. 8, 9). Under the pressures of urban densification, the courtyard has since been repurposed as a ticketed parking lot. For the project, a playground was reintroduced into this space. Modeled after Điềm Phùng Thị’s modular sign system and designed by Think Playgrounds, it included slides, swings, and climbing structures.⁶ The playground temporarily reclaimed the courtyard and returned it to its intended subject—children—while simultaneously calling into question the site’s future capacity for play, reverie, and cultural enrichment amid its ideological defunctionalizing and the rise of market-driven, privatized educational infrastructures.

Together, these positions formed not a consensus but rather a spectrum of interventions across which socialist legacies are variously negotiated, resisted, and reconfigured in the present. In drawing these tensions into the present, the project proposed nostalgia not as reconciliation or closure, but instead as ongoing negotiation with the political and affective residues of socialist ambition.

With special thanks to Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Minh Nguyen for their editorial input. 

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Ashamallah was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba or “catastrophe,” a paradigmatic rupture that would change the course of history and redefine the trajectory of Egyptian nation-building.² Her life thereafter has been decidedly marked by events that punctuate the making of modern Egypt. Like many Egyptians, her sense of time is structured by presidential eras (Nasser, Mubarak), wars (the Six-Day War, Al Naksa, the War of Attrition), and agreements (Camp David, Oslo). These sweeping, large-scale, political shifts have reverberated in Ashamallah’s private life. Indeed, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization policies impoverished her formerly middle-class family, and her brother’s martyrdom in the 1967 War of Attrition is a tragedy that has deeply afflicted her. 

Ashamallah grew up in Desouk, a provincial town in the Egyptian Nile River Delta region of Kafr-el-Sheikh, amid rural traditions that continue to influence her painting and drawing today. Though her Christian family was not originally from this region, they lived in Desouk because her father was assigned there to oversee life insurance policies. At home, her father’s library was rich with literature, which she pored over. Outside, she climbed sycamore trees, befriended the local livestock, and sang folk songs with the neighboring children. She planted rice and other seeds on her aunt’s land, fascinated by watching how plants grow and yield fruits for picking. Today, her imagination is still populated by the creatures, real and invented, that inhabited her early childhood. 

Against Canonization 

When prodded about the imaginative tropes in her work, Ashamallah sings a song that the village women would sing in a processional held at night during the lunar eclipse. Her artwork, which contains elements from Egyptian folklore and Pharaonic motifs—often hybridized alongside figments of her own imagination—offers novel interpretations of traditional forms. Ashamallah’s apartment is filled with paintings, and one that stands out is Hathour and Her Egg (1995), a large, prominent portrayal in her living room of the Pharaonic goddess Hathour (fig. 1). Ashamallah has been consistently preoccupied with the female figure and feminine prowess, as is evident in her depiction of Hathour, mother of all the Pharaohs and a goddess who represents the sky, motherhood, fertility, beauty, music, and joy. When asked what inspires these figures, she recounted a pivotal discovery: that the female mantis eats her partner by decapitating it after they have mated. Though Ashamallah did not elaborate further, it makes sense that the violence and beauty inherent to the natural process of mantis-mating could have inspired her to depict insect-like creatures as well as women with plants or other creatures inside their bellies. For Ashamallah, the female body is the touchstone of creation, the alpha and omega.³
 

It is challenging to attach Ashamallah to a particular school or “ism”—Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism. Instead, she weaves in and out of these styles at whim, eluding categorization by reworking forms that present her unique worldview. Though she received highly formal Beaux Arts–style training, she often surrenders her traditional education to follow the lead of her imagination. Her compositions present the world as she remembers it: full of trials and tribulations and marked by the simultaneity of euphoria and desolation. As an artist, her confidence in her own vision has always been steadfast. She recounts being on a field trip in middle school and visiting the Fine Arts Library. When her friend asked her, “Have you seen Picasso?” she responded, “Who is Picasso? I am Evelyn Ashamallah.” 

Her politics are seldom explicitly manifest in her artwork, though on certain occasions, she has illustrated specific political events, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre or the ongoing genocide in Gaza (fig. 2). Nevertheless, most of her paintings and drawings are not didactic. When looking back on her body of work, it is difficult not to read certain pieces as parallels to the large-scale political transformations taking place in the background at the time they were made. Compositions featuring peasants tilling their land or astronauts (fig. 3), aliens, and UFOs evoke societal changes such as the 1952 Land Reform Law, which redistributed Egypt’s arable land, or the establishment of a national space program in 1960. 

As a young artist, Ashamallah found herself caught in the 20th-century gestation of a new republic. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1973 and then moved to Cairo. There, not yet fully embracing her painting practice, she worked as a journalist for Rūz al-Yūsuf, a weekly political magazine that had just begun distribution in the Gulf countries. Her first piece, published in August 1973, was on the bride economy between the Gulf and Egypt. As an investigative journalist, she shed light on cases of newly wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who would come to various rural places across Egypt and purchase young girls to bring home as wives. After this fearless debut, she earned a living by writing similar political, investigative editorial pieces until a disagreement with her editor led her to find work elsewhere. In 1977, the Egyptian government issued a warrant for Ashamallah’s arrest for her alleged involvement in leftist political activity. Forced to leave the country until they were no longer targets of the Egyptian state, she and her husband, journalist Mahmoud Yousri, moved to Algeria, where they lived in exile for six years. While she would not return to journalism, she was always involved in her husband’s editorial work and has remained an avid writer. Later in her practice, she began incorporating her writings into her artwork.

During one of our interviews, I asked Ashamallah about her relationship to politics after the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, in which she played a prominent role as a leading dissident and organizer. She discussed how, in retrospect, almost fifteen years later, she sees “how naive and blind we were, how we didn’t understand anything.”⁴ Now, after a lifetime of involvement in different political groups—ranging from leftist to Marxist to Socialist to Communist throughout regime changes and political fluctuations—Ashamallah wants her artwork to be free of political determinations and social burdens. As she explained to me, “They’re free to politicize whatever they want. For me, what do I do? What is good for me to do? I paint. Let me paint.”⁵
 

Exile and Early Drawings

In our discussions, Ashamallah referenced multiple times how the farmers’ fields inspired her developing visual language as a young girl.⁶ Despite this, she did not demonstrate interest in landscape painting while a student in Alexandria. Instead, she preferred riding the tram all day long and watching—and drawing—the hustle-bustle. It was not until she arrived in Tiaret, Algeria, in 1977 and encountered the topography of the agricultural province that she began drawing landscapes. Before traveling to Algeria, she had never seen such majestic hillsides. Given the flat, agricultural lands of her childhood, she was captivated by the different elevations in her first landscapes, which are often rendered in flat compositions with multiple planes stacked on top of each other. This compositional structure has remained present throughout her work, as she still typically divides the surface—whether cardboard, canvas, or paper—into sections that she then populates with original forms.

Landscape in Algeria (1980) is made of quasi-organic, geometric shapes that are common in her other illustrations from this time (fig. 4). Inspired by local crafts within the Amazigh tradition, Ashamallah borrowed certain forms that suited her desire to blend human figures with bushes, and trees with architecture. This hybridization is a constant throughout her artistic practice, whereby people are depicted with plantlike traits, and animal-creatures float in boundless spaces, undisturbed by the laws of perspective or gravity. 

In Algeria, Ashamallah’s husband only found sporadic work as a schoolteacher, and so they struggled to make ends meet. Though she never stopped drawing (“not even for one day”), it was a rare joy for her to receive colors, and when she did, she gravitated toward the saturated tones that she would later use in her acrylic works. 

When they moved from Tiaret to the capital of Algiers, Ashamallah developed a tight-knit community of friends from the political, intellectual, and artistic milieus across the Arab region—Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, of course, Algeria. She was influenced by many of the conversations that took place at this time. The Algerian modernist artist Mohammed Khadda states in his essay “Elements for a New Art,” which he wrote fresh out of the Algerian War (1954–62) in 1964, “Our country is taking the socialist path, and the artist—like the worker and the peasant, has a duty to participate in the edification of this new world, in which man will no longer exploit man.”⁷ Though Ashamallah never directly references Khadda—except for in a side conversation in which she notes his calligraphic forms with admiration—it is clear that Ashamallah shares some of the concerns he waged in the formation of the new independent Algeria. She was inspired by the goings-on around her and has spoken extensively about the importance of her time in Algeria in her personal life and artistic trajectory.

In 1984, Ashamallah returned to an Egypt that was fundamentally different from the country she had left: one that was rife with economic disparity, increasingly common sectarian clashes, and a new age of political repression under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, determined to support her children and continue making art, Ashamallah engaged with formal cultural apparatuses, staging exhibitions in state-run venues such as the Cairo Atelier (1986), among others. In the 1990s, she served as director of the Mohamed Nagy Museum in Giza before becoming director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. In 2011, she left this post, emphatically exposed the corruption within the Ministry of Culture, and took to Tahrir Square. 

The Rural Trace

Now, as Ashamallah has lived longer in the dense urbanity of Cairo than in its rural environs, she continues to derive inspiration from the landscape that defined her youth. It is there that she identifies the “Egyptian spirit” in its truth and essence. This portrayal of the rural as the “essence” of the nation, and the peasant as the “true Egyptian,” defined art historical, literary, and political debates in Egyptian modernism throughout the 20th century. In 1911, the newly established Egyptian Faculty of Fine Arts opened with a European curriculum and the following aim: “After having taught the students the conventional rules of each art, the professors shall endeavour to develop in them a taste for a national art, that which should become the expression of the modern civilized Egyptian. This will be thanks to what is available to them through the remarkable examples they see of Egyptian monuments and relics and of the Golden Age of Arab art.”⁸

Egyptian modernists responded to this prompt by representing the rural Egyptian, a figure that could potentially unite a heterogeneous population seeking a national identity.⁹ As did the artists Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), Seif Wanly (1906–1979) and his brother Adham Wanly (1908–1959), Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Mahmoud Naghi (1888–1956), Hamed Owais (1919–2011), and Injy Aflatoun (1924–1989) before her, Ashamallah identified the rural condition as the ultimate, defining feature of Egyptian society. Like them, she occupied an insider-outsider position, portraying the peasant from close proximity though never fully occupying the role herself. 

In the scramble to locate a static Egyptian national identity, images of peasants and the agricultural landscape they tilled—an unchanging constant across dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of rule—became a fixture in Egyptian artistic representation of the 20th century.¹⁰ From Mahmoud Said’s 1938 portrait Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a Printed Dress) to Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1930 sculpture Au Bord du Nil (On the Banks of the Nile) or Injy Aflatoun’s 1963 L’Or Blanc (White Gold), the Egyptian modernists were obsessed with portraying the “ordinary Egyptian” in a rural setting. There is no doubt that this practice was highly influential in Evelyn Ashamallah’s work, with some of her early works portraying women as abstract, organic figures that resemble Mokhtarian sculptures. 

In 1986, Ashamallah borrowed from the tropes of peasant representation (for example, the jagged portraiture of Hamed Oweais and the rural stereotypes of Ragheb Ayad) in Portrait or Analysis of the features of the Egyptian peasant, a profile sketch with a pseudo-Pharaonic phrenology (fig. 5). While this portrait borrows from Ashamallah’s antecedents, it also demonstrates the germination of some of her signature features: the almond-shaped hollow eyes and large skull. Over time, she further developed her own typologies of representation, departing from the rural depictions typical in the work of earlier Egyptian modernists.

In her 1990 drawing The Peasants’ Hope, Ashamallah employs the signature stacked composition she used in her early Algerian landscapes to completely recast a tired and pernicious rural trope (fig. 6). In the left of the composition, a woman with curly hair and an earring in the form of a striped bird diving downward is rendered in closeup profile above an underworld inhabited by part-sea part-human creatures, who swim toward a twirling structure at the surface. Above it, a central figure is positioned in the typical Pharaonic stance, wherein the feet point in one direction, and the body and head face the viewer. This figure also wears bird-like jewelry as well as a snake on its head. On the right, the artist stacks three figures on top of each other to make one hybrid creature: a crouching man, a bird-woman, and a flower-child. Each figure in this totemic trio relates to a figment from Ashamallah’s memory. Free from the stereotypical tropes that were common in the work of her predecessors, Ashamallah portrays what she knows about Egyptian peasants. Perhaps her renderings are acts of subversion, but it is more likely that they are forms of fantastical futurity, pointing to a time when humans, animals, land, sea, and sky will have all collapsed into an incongruent harmony.  

Throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, Ashamallah dove further into the interspecies realms that had long populated her imagination. In the work from this period, we can begin to identify recurring motifs, including femininity, motherhood, and birth, which are conveyed by pregnant creatures or by characters contained in eggs, and womanhood in the form of reptilian beings with full breasts. These works almost always contain an unbridled articulation of humor and whimsy. As time progressed, Ashamallah depicted her figures with more limbs, tails, and fins, and she portrayed their encounters with even more levity. In her droll renderings, she would imagine conversations between different species that, as she has stated, “are not so easy to understand.” In her painting Balance (1993), we see her signature saturated colors deployed in the portrayal of four figures spilling over four quadrants of a composition (fig. 7). A turnip-headed red boy lies on his stomach and swings his feet next to a blue star creature with red lips, who smiles directly at the viewer. On the bottom of the composition, another red boy balances a reptilian figure in his mouth and an upside-down pyramid on his foot. As in Ashamallah’s other works, the composition is split and stacked, with each section containing a creature floating in its own respective world, yet brought into conversation with the other creatures in their whimsical portrayal.

In the fall of 2024, Ashamallah’s largest retrospective opened at Azad Art Gallery in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. Titled The Harvest of a Lifetime, this exhibition was organized by decade, demonstrating Ashamallah’s evolution as an artist and offering unfettered access to her phantasmagorical world.¹¹ In some ways, Ashamallah’s ongoing legacy fits squarely into an art historical evolution of Egyptian modernism that draws key articulations from the rural. However, her representations offer something much more alluring than those of her predecessors. In reading her paintings and drawings alongside her writings, her exile, her political engagement, and then her disengagement, it becomes clear that her imagination is her antidote to the injustices that she has borne witness to throughout her life. She knows that this world-building is not entirely her own creation, as it follows the folktales and customs that surrounded her as a child. Now, looking back on a life laden with the contradictions, affiliations, and disaffiliations not uncommon to those navigating the rubble of the 20th century, Ashamallah consciously returns to the land, still, still invigorated by the potential of its promise (fig 8). 

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Carlos Quijon, Jr.: A typical entry point to the political in art is representation. I am interested in how you conceptualize the political and ideas of representation in relation to your practice, particularly in terms of your chosen materials and modalities. For one, this question relates to how you are also very embedded in activism, and most of your works use the forms and materialities of activist paraphernalia—banners, placards, etc. These are forms that are not necessarily made to last. Usually they are made from whatever materials are available and intended to be site-specific and very agile. For the other, there is the notion of address. We can think about the place of Port Dickson in Malaysia in your work, which is, in a sense, a hyperlocal site. What do you think about that in relation to, for example, the legibility of the political in your work? This question of address further opens up to the category of contemporary art. How do you reconcile your practice’s specificity of address with the wider circulation and citations of global contemporary art? Is this something that you also try to speak to in your work?

Sharon Chin: One of the features of doing activism here [in Port Dickson]—extremely local political action—is that so much depends on being around. The more I participate in the art world, the more I’m in a state of hypermobility that puts me at odds with staying local, or as I prefer to say it, being around. I’m away for a time, and I’ll miss things—that’s normal. But if it keeps happening, then the relationships that have built up from me being around start to adjust to the reality of my intermittent presence. And it’s not just neighbors and townspeople, it’s the land. The animals and plants, the mangrove trees, the rocks on the beaches . . . they forget my name, they lose my number. 

This sounds like a one-way ticket to burnout at both ends. But spending time on the land has helped me understand that endurance can look less like individual struggle and more like collective ongoingness. When I saw the first green shoots in a mangrove forest devastated by an oil spill, I knew that crabs and snails had probably come back under the mud and were doing their thing. At some point, if we’re lucky, the feedback loops of mutually engaged agents in an ecosystem reach a stage where they take on a life of their own. I try to remember that and focus my activism on multiplying relations between neighbors, surrounding neighborhoods, local authorities, and refinery executives. Broadcasting online is not central at all to the strategy, but it is an important tool to have. The goal is to create social connections that are dense enough to produce emergent outcomes—and to reduce reliance on any single agent.  

What I call “going on the land” is just spending time in the landscape that I call home. Being with the land, hiking, whatever. I’ll admit, in the beginning (a few years ago), I would go with a proposal or grant deadline chasing my heels, and look to the land to provide—I don’t know—content or insight or something I could use. But in recent years, I’m not searching for anything when I’m out on the land. It’s more like a leisurely day with a favorite person—brunch, a second coffee, evening drinks. That kind of pleasurable intimacy and companionship, always finding something new in their dear, familiar face. A relationship defined by long and stimulating ongoingness.  

Then there’s the oil refinery next door. That’s an ongoing relationship too. It was established by Shell in the 1960s and taken over by a Chinese multinational in 2018. The first few years of the new management were not bad—they engaged residents in good faith and actively tried to mitigate the pollution from the refinery. But that changed when the C-suite turned over, and the last three years have been like living next to Mordor. I need to be around all the time, otherwise we lose momentum in the neighborhood organizing—a fact that’s at odds with the mobility and visibility requirements of participating in the art world.

A similar ongoingness has been playing out in my practice since 2018, when Creatures of Near Kingdoms came out. It’s a book of short stories about fantastic animals and plants, set in Southeast Asia. My partner Zedeck Siew wrote the stories, and I made a series of linocuts and repeating patterns to illustrate each one (fig. 1). I’ve iterated some of the animal forms in the book into a number of projects over the years: enlarging them into placards for a climate protest in Kuala Lumpur (2019; figs. 2–5) and photographing them as shadow puppets lit by the refinery flare for Creatures on the Move (2022–24; figs. 6–8). An upcoming show in 2026 will bring me closer to realizing my vision of a shadow-puppet play, but it will also be about animals disappearing from the scene, leaving humans alone on the stage we created and in the spotlight we’re so unwilling to share. Where have they gone? I want to find out—I will follow them.    

To your point about how these conditions have shaped the formal aspects of my work, I’d say I’m conscious of playing with a certain lack of polish in presentation. I am familiar with the grammar of the gallery or museum space. I’m not sure these are necessarily political choices given the context, but they are certainly aesthetic ones. For example, wheat-pasting poster images directly to the gallery walls for Creatures on the Move, as opposed to using light boxes or getting wall stickers professionally installed (figs. 9, 10). The technique is messy and laborious and finicky enough that I have to be on-site to do it myself (with assistants). But the glitches and wrinkles left behind exude the warmth of humans working in space and time, which I believe can be perceived by the person looking. How much of this is just compensating for my lack of technical ability or resources to create high-definition finishes? It doesn’t matter. I’m an artist as well as an activist, and how good or bad my politics are is not a stand-in for the formal choices I make in a gallery space. It’s probably more important to remember that the reverse is also true.   

CQJr: My next question is a bit more self-reflexive. I am wondering if there’s some anxiety about these forms being cannibalized by the art world. In relation to, for example, more performative, ephemeral, temporary forms and how these kinds of materials and forms have been co-opted by the contemporary art world into mere spectacle or contemporary currency. I was wondering if you have this anxiety? 

These kinds of forms can easily be co-opted by contemporary art into abstract values of specificity or timeliness. Or if there’s no anxiety, I am wondering if you’ve been thinking about ways to prevent this co-optation. I think, off the top of my head, that your idea of “anti-polish” is something like that. Do you have these kinds of strategies for how to participate in the contemporary art world without having the political edge of such forms blunted by it?

SC: In contemporary art spaces, staging—what is allowed to be visible—is everything. I am constantly aware of that. In many ways people can only perceive what is put in front of them. In terms of the reality of living next to an oil refinery, I’m not interested in representing my activism work in a gallery space because 1) I have yet to be moved by seeing a spreadsheet in a museum, and 2) it doesn’t help the activism. 

Although I have been tempted sometimes to do that because there’s a legitimacy to all that documentation, I’m averse to most archive-based artworks in a gallery setting, where there are vitrines, diagrams, files of documents to dig through, books on a shelf, etc. And I understand it’s a whole museological thing. What’s interesting is that evidence-gathering has been crucial in our neighborhood’s struggle against refinery pollution. There’s so much data collection and building paper trails for every stage of engagement. Then the material has to be translated, i.e., made legible, to various agents. In fact, CCTV footage of the refinery’s flare stack has done the most so far to convince both the public and the authorities of the harm that’s being done to us by industrial emissions (figs. 11–12, 19–23). 

But when it comes to an exhibition, I’m not thinking about that kind of legibility at all. I’m concerned about how these empirical data are translated into questions of form, of space. I’m concerned with what’s going to seduce the person who’s looking, because that’s why I look at art: to be entranced and transported into the heart of something. 

The anxiety about being co-opted, I feel . . . no, I don’t. Maybe I used to, but these days, there’s a confidence in being able to step into different spaces and contexts. It’s funny—I used to have more anxiety about it when I made art about national politics, like Weeds/Rumpai  (2013–15), a series of weeds painted on political party flags collected during election time (figs. 13–14), or Mandi Bunga/Flower Bath (2013), a performance inspired by the Bersih movement for clean and fair elections, in which I had a hundred people take a flower bath with me in public (figs. 15–18).

I think doing activism at the local level has made me more confident about stepping into and addressing the particularities of any given space. So if we’re in the contemporary art space, I’m in control of what goes in, what is staged, and importantly, what is refused. Sometimes it helps to think about being like a river (although I find it vaguely obnoxious or cringeworthy—who do I think I am, Bruce Lee?), because that means there’s no place I won’t go, but also, I’m just passing through; I won’t be trapped, and there’s nothing to fear. 

Whatever the work or project is, it’s made to be carried into different contexts. There is a lightness and contingency built into the form that helps it catch whatever current is available. All this stuff needs to find its way back, too, to the place that gave it meaning—that’s its momentum. That circulation is very important, because it’s how you don’t get trapped by prestige or authority or the need to impress. The gallery or institution is not where things end. It shouldn’t end there. It’s just another stop.

CQJr: I think this also speaks to how you foreground ideas of distribution and circulation and their relationship to the political. I feel like the one thing about forms, particularly “activist forms,” like the effigy, the agitprop, the zines, is that all of them that are easy to produce and distribute, easy to let go of, easy to shed off, easy to keep. So, I think that’s also something interesting about your practice, how that formal genealogy also informs or is thought through your works. There is a keen attentiveness to this across what you do.

My last question is in relation to the categories. I feel like the categories always matter because with the categories comes currency and visibility. What do you think about art and activism? How do you see, in your practice in particular, the relationship between art and activism? And I want to dovetail this question to what you mentioned before as the seduction of form.  

I feel like that was something interesting when we were doing the project with Ilham Gallery in Malaysia. Of course your work there was about Port Dickson and the effects of the refinery on the community, but you created wayang puppets of animals found in and around Port Dickson. This was the translation that you mentioned earlier, and it was so evident in that project. You don’t lose sight of the politics of the refinery, but it’s not like your activist persona will be the same as your artist figure. I am wondering if you can talk more about the relationship between art and activism—and how the forms are the ones in a way mediating the relationship for you. 

SC: I think this can be clarified with that river metaphor. Lately I have started to ask myself, “Can the neighborhood speak to the national or international, and what does it have to say?” But then there’s the other question: Can the national or international artist speak to the neighborhood? 

When I lived in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, I felt comfortable about speaking on what I perceived to be national issues, translated through an intensely personal and subjective lens. My works were addressed to an imaginary national audience. But the thing about moving to Port Dickson and becoming a local is that the address turns around, and I am confronted with the question of how to speak to the people here. Now the river metaphor turns into a challenge to live up to: Can you go everywhere, in all directions? Back and forth from the neighborhood to the national and from the national to the neighborhood. So we’re just circulating things constantly: forms, ideas; translating, carrying something from there to here.

I think what artists and activists share is a spirit or a will to intervene in reality. You’re awake to the world and all its forms of address to you. You’re picking up those calls, baby. Otherwise, where will the art come from—or the frankly stupid conviction required to make things better for life on earth?

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This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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In this essay, Guillermo S. Arsuaga presents a critical examination of architectural modernism through the lens of one of the most renowned examples of modern architecture in Africa: La Pyramide designed by Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). His meticulous study of Olivieri’s unique photographic record of the project, the focus of which is predominantly the construction process, offers a nuanced understanding of modernism, one that transcends traditional architect-centered narratives. Olivieri’s images reveal a compelling emphasis on the integral role of African labor and the network of expertise and materials active in shaping the building, a perspective often overlooked in conventional architectural studies. Arsuaga underscores the significance of recognizing these elements, of viewing architecture not merely as a physical structure but also as a complex confluence of human endeavor, resources, intellect, and societal forces. He argues that such an understanding of modernism, one embracing the pivotal contributions of laborers from the continent, fosters a more nuanced narrative of architectural history. He concludes with a call for further exploration of the roles of these underrepresented agents across diverse architectural projects and contexts as a means of enhancing narratives and understanding of architectural history and modernism.

In February 2023, I visited the residence of Rebecca Olivieri on the banks of the Adige River in Verona and the private archive dedicated to her father, Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri (1931–1998), who significantly shaped Abidjan’s architectural landscape in the nascent independent Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). His most significant work, La Pyramide (The Pyramid), is a highlight of so-called African architectural modernism—the architectural materialization that emerged in diverse forms across the continent as a result of the convergence of modernity’s aspirations and the quest for national identity catalyzed by the wave of African independences in the 1960s and 1970s.

While discourse on African architectural modernism—especially its implications for postcolonial emancipation—has proliferated in the last few years, Olivieri’s private archive offers a unique perspective on La Pyramide.¹Indeed, it foregrounds labor and materiality, sharpening our understanding of modernism’s intricacies and the networks underpinning its manifestation in a newly independent Côte d’Ivoire.²

Olivieri undertook the project of building La Pyramide in 1972, following design commissions for the pavilion, Cote d’Ivoire, at the Japan World Exposition in Osaka in 1970 and the Istituto Tecnico Industriale in Verona in 1966. Located in the heart of Abidjan, in the district of Plateau, La Pyramide was introduced as a departure from the prevalent glass-and-steel constructions imported from Europe that had proven unsuitable in Cote d’Ivoire due to the country’s intense sunlight and need for consistent air conditioning.³In other words, it was looked upon as a form of architectural modernism specific to the Ivorian context.⁴

Commissioned by SOCIPEC, the first fully Ivorian real estate company, and funded by the National Financing Company, the project unfolded over three years, from 1970 to 1973.⁵Initially named “Centre commercial ad Abidjan,” the building quickly earned the affectionate moniker “La Pyramide” among Ivorians due to its pyramidal form.⁶Once finished, the building became a visual landmark. Moreover, within its 234,600 square feet (21,800 square meters), it fulfilled a range of functions associated with modern urban life, including providing office spaces, studios, a restaurant, an exhibition space, an auditorium, a parking area, a nightclub, and a supermarket. La Pyramide’s dominant triangular plan and truncated pyramidal volume, structurally made in reinforced concrete, rises more than two hundred feet (sixty-one meters) and spans fifteen floors (fig. 1).

According to Olivieri, La Pyramide’s distinctive shape, far from a pure geometrical composition, draws from a formal abstraction of precolonial African bird figurines.⁷The interest in anchoring the building in African culture was reinforced in Olivieri’s reference to his conception of La Pyramide as a “large covered market,” in effect a modern reinterpretation of the traditional African market, which served similarly important social and cultural functions.⁸ This endeavor is architecturally evoked in the multilevel central hall, a daylight-infused space and the building’s commercial and social hub (figs. 2 and 3). At the same time, this main hall functioned architecturally as a key organizational space, facilitating access to various levels encompassing offices and commercial areas, all visually connected within the hall (see fig. 3). This space is illuminated by natural light, which, in conjunction with the suspended concrete walkways, contributed to a visibly engaging design. Indeed, Olivieri described these elements as facilitating “evocative” interplays of light and space, a concept inspired by the drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778).⁹

The central hall is perhaps the most architecturally experimental aspect of La Pyramide, in effect reversing the characteristics typical of a building’s core. Traditionally dark and secluded, this space is instead a light-filled, gathering place. It simultaneously offers shelter from sun and rain, drawing inspiration from the dynamic ambiance of traditional covered outdoor markets (see fig. 2, 3 and 13).

The layout of La Pyramide is programmatically articulated, characterized by a stratification of spaces by their intended use. The first twelve floors were designed to contain offices, retail venues, and studios, which are arrayed in a triangular perimeter across suspended walkways that surround the central hall—enhancing its role as a center for social and commercial exchange.

At the heart of the building, on the third floor, an exhibition room appears to be suspended within the central hall. The thirteenth floor, which was dedicated to a restaurant, provides a panoramic view of Abidjan and Ébrié Lagoon, and an auditorium on the fourteenth and fifteenth floors crowns this main volume.

Attached to the pyramidal space, two vertical towers contain the elevators, stairs, and bathrooms—thus freeing up space in the central hall (typically, a tall building would incorporate these infrastructural elements in its core). Above the ground floor, between one of the towers and the main volume, a circular extension that once housed a snack bar cantilevers toward the street. The three-level basement of La Pyramide originally included, top to bottom, a supermarket, a nightclub, and a parking lot.¹⁰

An outstanding architectural feature of the exterior is the aluminum components that Olivieri employed in contrast to what is otherwise raw concrete. Explained as a climatic adaptation, these metal elements wrap horizontally around the facade in the form of brise-soleils that not only shield the glazed side but also the outdoor walkways extending across three sides of ten levels of the building.

The Evolving Modern Legacy of La Pyramide

The initial aims of modernity and La Pyramide have decayed over the years. Once hailed by the architectural press as a significant exemplar of Ivorian architectural emergence, the building now stands in a state of neglect. Since the 1980s, it has remained largely unoccupied and closed to the public, owing to the high costs associated with its maintenance.¹¹Nevertheless, there are ongoing initiatives focused on its repurposing and restoration that give new hope to the revival of the structure.¹²

Amid discussions of the future of La Pyramide, Olivieri’s project archive in Verona, until now largely unexplored, offers a window into not only the intricate ideation and construction of the building but also the role of architecture in mediating the relationships between representation, labor, and materials in an incipient Ivorian nation.

Ascending to the second floor of the palazzo in Verona, one encounters a realm in which Olivieri’s memories and works have been carefully preserved by his daughter, Rebecca. These tangible remnants of the architect’s legacy—photographs, sketches, architectural models, and press clippings—all of which he brought back to Italy upon concluding his professional work in Abidjan, where he moved with his family, spent several years in residence, and acquired Ivorian nationality.¹³Various drawings—watercolors, pencil sketches, and Conté crayon renderings—adorn the walls, each silently attesting to Rinaldo’s drawing proficiency. Yet, within this vast repository, there is an unmistakable absence—there are no drawings or blueprints of La Pyramide, the architect’s most celebrated creation (and the reason for my visit).

Rebecca suggested that most large-size architectural renderings from the 1970s, including those of La Pyramide, might have been challenging to transport from Abidjan, and therefore left behind. As I explored the boxes dedicated to the project, I confirmed the glaring absence of what many architects regard as foundational to architectural documentation: original drawings, which are (to a certain extent) present among the records of Rinaldo’s other projects related to Côte d’Ivoire, such as the Osaka Pavilion and San Pedro Airport city. Rinaldo’s archive for La Pyramide instead sparkles with black-and-white photographs—some showcasing early models, others recording the completed building, and still others making up an extensive series chronicling the construction process. While I browsed these photographs, Rebecca mentioned Rinaldo had shot the images taken on-site himself. Alongside these were a few 11 x 8 1/2–inch photocopies of drawings of La Pyramide and some sketches of the same dimensions—quite different from the drawings an architectural office would traditionally produce.

This revelation is particularly striking against the backdrop of traditional Western narratives of modern architecture, in which the architect is lauded as the singular genius behind innovation and aesthetic excellence. Such accounts are sustained by a reliance on the architectural archives and full-scale drawings commonly thought to preserve the architect’s original intentions and the intellectual interests that inspired them. Yet, the collected artifacts related to La Pyramide lack such “original” or full-scale drawings, typically the cornerstone of an architectural archive, suggesting that there are missing pieces in terms of the building’s architectural history.¹⁴

Upon closer scrutiny of the available material—predominantly construction photographs—I discovered an opportunity to understand the architectural process behind La Pyramidein a new light. I found myself enthralled by the idea that these pictures, in their plentiful number and varied perspectives, provided something significant about Olivieri’s view of the project. This was not just a smattering of images but nearly 150 photographs—some duplicated, some cropped, some refocused, and some reformatted. First, they were taken by the architect himself, making them a direct trace of what he thought was worth recording and of his main preoccupations while engaged in the project. Second, there was a postproduction process within the selection as is evidenced by the cropping and crossing out of images recorded in dozens of contact sheets. And, finally, these photographs—among the presumably many documents Olivieri could have saved to illustrate the project—were the ones he chose to transfer from his studio in Abidjan to his house in Verona. In short, at that point, I realized, most likely for him, these images likely encapsulated for him a more holistic depiction of the project than any one drawing could.

Surveying Olivieri’s photographs of La Pyramide, many of which depict African laborers at work, one is immediately struck by the dual nature of the imagery. On the one hand, this focus can be seen as embodying the colonial viewpoint of a European architect capturing African labor though his own lens. However, on the other, in terms of tracing the history of the building, it unfurls a network of diverse involvements, revealing the intricate meshwork of hands and minds that forged the building’s existence, shedding light on the complex interplay of roles and thereby enriching our architectural discourse. In this sense, Olivieri’s images can be interpreted beyond a binary perspective, one that sees them as either an imperial tool or an instrument of liberation. They are, in fact, tools in illuminating the active roles and perspectives of laborers and other participants in the construction process, in prompting a critical examination while acknowledging the underlying power dynamics and colonial implications.¹⁵

The photographs in the collection provide a rich chronicle of the construction process, including of the site, the materials and techniques employed, and especially the labor engaged throughout the project. Who were these workers? Were they Ivorian locals or brought in from afar? Were they West African migrants? How many hands contributed to this task, and under whose directive? While the photographs housed within the Olivieri archive may not answer all of these questions, they undeniably suggest a more multifaceted understanding of African architectural modernism.

These images invite a shift in perspective—one that steps away from the single authorship of the architect and toward an understanding of a building as the result of a collaborative effort. Rather than perpetuating an architect-centric narrative, this view sees the architect as one part of a broader constellation of contributors within a network encompassing power dynamics and economic, cultural, and social factors, thereby offering a more nuanced architectural history, one that intersects with discourses on labor, materials, colonial legacies, and postcolonial aspirations.

Modern Narratives: Olivieri’s Photographic Chronicle of La Pyramide

That February day in Verona, as I flipped through Olivieri’s images, I saw that they had been chronologically organized, from the foundation excavations to the building’s final rise. Looking at the architect’s numerous images of the foundation, I sensed his fascination with the choreography of laborers, tools, and materials involved in the initial excavation. To be sure, these images reveal less of an abstract void than of a pulsating node of human endeavor. Indeed, later, in a coffee-scented interlude, the late architect’s widow, Isabella, tenderly shared memories of Abidjan.¹⁶Revisiting her first brush with a vast excavation—destined to become the basement of La Pyramide—she reflected on this being the inaugural spectacle Rinaldo had elected to unveil to her upon her arrival to Abidjan.

Within the images of the excavation and setup of the foundation, one image particularly struck me: It depicts a massive cubic void, some sixty feet deep, punctuating the earth, and shows five African laborers at work (fig. 4). Four are in the bottom of the trench, engaged in the fundamental acts of digging and earth removal. Another ascends a ladder, contributing to the emerging verticality that hints at what will become La Pyramide.

In looking at this photograph, I began to discern Olivieri’s active role in shaping the narrative of LaPyramide’s construction. The scale of the excavation is underscored by the individual efforts of the laborers who, using manual means, appear to effortlessly carve the clay-rich soil, which stands vertically, defying the need for support. The framing of the photograph further intensifies this perception, with the void almost five times higher than the workers—beyond the reach of a ladder. However, one can discern the role of heavy machinery by the subtle tire marks visible on the ground. This equipment, I surmise, was consciously excluded from the frame. By choosing to highlight the monumental scale of the carved void alongside intense manual labor, and simultaneously omitting the machinery that typically would be involved, Olivieri, whether consciously or unconsciously, revitalized the role and agency of these laborers within the grand narrative of the building’s construction.

Consider another photograph depicting five laborers assiduously arranging rebar into a sharp hexagonal cast-in-place footing anchored within the soil (fig. 5). Visible in the right-hand side of the image, the concrete truck’s chute stands ready for a pour while its delivery is guided by a handcrafted wooden support system. Yet again, the heavy machinery, both the truck and the mixer, are outside of the frame, focusing the viewer’s attention on the workers themselves and the craftmanship of the pristine geometrical footing.

While construction is inherently collaborative, Olivieri’s emphasis on this expansive agency in his archival record present in these photographs offers an opportunity to highlight the role of African workers. Moreover, it provides a critical lens through which to challenge the oversimplified single-author narrative that has, at times, dominated architectural discourse.

As La Pyramide rose from its foundation, Olivieri’s photographic effort was unwavering, particularly toward the intricate interplay of main structural components imported from Italy and assembled by African craftsmen in Abidjan (see fig. 6 and 7). In his photographic chronicle, he captured the dynamic between industrial-engineered structural elements designed by Riccardo Morandi (1902–1989)—a leading figure in reinforced concrete work in Italy—and their nuanced integration and assembly by local hands.¹⁷ Rather than isolating these construction elements in the manner of detached, abstracted representations of engineering or architectural objects, Olivieri continuously anchored them in relation to the African labor force, rendering this construction history within a broader context. This decision provides a perspective on a long-standing question in the history of architectural modernism: how global designs, networks of materials, and labor relate to the local landscapes and communities in which they are realized.

Take, for instance, the photograph in which Olivieri purposefully captures an African worker meticulously retouching a beam on La Pyramide’s uppermost level (fig. 8). Far from the result of a random snapshot, the composition is orchestrated to mirror the structure of the neighboring pillars and to highlight the laborer’s contribution. Standing tall, he brushes the underside of a ceiling beam, fresh from the removal of the supporting forms and shoring that supported the concrete during curing. Within the scene, a second workman dismantles the shoring on the floor beneath. This picture, set against the panorama of Abidjan’s Ébrié Lagoon and an array of modern residential buildings, suggests that Abidjan is not just in the process of being transformed but already the embodiment of modernity. Once again, whether consciously or unconsciously, Olivieri’s framing juxtaposes the realities of the laborers against the emergence of a modern Abidjan, reiterating the indispensable role of African laborers in shaping this perception.

Beyond the Frame: Reimagining Modernism through La Pyramide

As I delved deeper into the recesses of Olivieri’s archive, a previously overlooked photograph captured my attention. The image showcases a group of African workers ostensibly engrossed in setting up temporary lodgings for La Pyramide’s workforce (fig. 9). Yet it was not their labor that captivated me, but rather the billboard prominently situated in the foreground. Towering at twenty-four feet, it bears the inscription “Centre Commercial SOCIPEC IMOBILIERE,” which is set above a depiction of La Pyramide. Intriguingly, the sign also delineates the diverse entities involved in the construction La Pyramide—architect Rinaldo Olivieri, concrete engineer Ricardo Morandi (who, like Olivieri, hailed from Italy), Sinitra (the Ghanaian construction firm trusted with the majority of the construction), Socotec (a French entity charged with supervision), Fenzi (a Northern Italian firm supplying aluminum and window frames), and Otis (the American titan responsible for the elevators).

I realized this picture captures the core of the power dynamics between various agents and initiatives during the construction of La Pyramide. It renders the dominance of so-called European technical expertise (such as that of Olivieri, Morandi, or Fenzi) juxtaposed with nascent African companies within the new nation-state framework (such as SOCIPEC and Sinitra)—all of which is juxtaposed with the African laborers setting up their temporary settlement.

Discovering multiple iterations of this image in Olivieri’s collection piqued my curiosity. Why had Olivieri repeatedly chosen to photograph this particular scene? Perhaps because it encapsulated the role of La Pyramide within African modernism more effectively than any other—a role defined not by its scale or use of aluminum and concrete, but rather by the dynamic convergence of labor and technical know-how and the African endeavors toward modernity that brought it to life. Concurrently, this construction narrative, coupled with the initial idea behind the building—to reinterpret the rhythms of the traditional marketplace by infusing local commerce with modernist aesthetics and spaces—perhaps evidences the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of architectural African modernism and its contested role in the continent’s time of self-determination and the different experiences and subjectivities, from African workers to European technicians, that it entailed.

This exploration leads to broader contemplation within the field of architectural history, which has often overlooked non-Western geographies such as Africa.¹⁸ An expansive reassessment of modernity that transcends a Western-centric focus demands a reexamination of both the architect’s role and the presumed objectivity of archival materials within the larger narrative of architectural modernism. Far from being an obstacle in the task of writing history, this broader scope offers fertile ground for inquiry within a canon traditionally dominated by Western perspectives. The realms of architectural practice, such as labor, that typically have been marginalized within mainstream discourse provide vital alternative viewpoints, cultural richness, and distinct architectural frameworks that challenge and subvert the dominant Western-centric ideology of the architect’s realm. As a result, both the architect’s contributions and the very shape of architectural archives take on a nuanced complexity, defying simple categorization.

This shift away from monolithic understanding enhances the possibility for a more inclusive reading of architectural history. It offers a fresh view of modernist architecture and underscores the diverse agents who influenced its trajectory. It encourages a broader understanding of a building, one extending beyond aesthetics and construction, to consider it as a reflection of prevailing power structures, aesthetic norms, economic conditions, labor practices, and material uses. A deliberate pivot from the architect as the central figure allows the emergence of the lesser-acknowledged agents often eclipsed in Western narratives. This reorientation invites a more expansive vista of the modern canon, one that welcomes those in previously shadowed roles.

In this sense, Olivieri’s photographs foster an understanding of modernism that extends beyond the physical edifice . They underscore a collective action that interweaves the builders, materials, and users, nurturing an evolving African modernity. This perspective, though it might seem logical at this point, significantly differs from earlier portrayals of the building, such as its depiction in the 1979 MoMA exhibition Transformations in Modern Architecture, in which the building was predominantly presented as a finished object lacking human interaction, and in the L’Architettura magazine article of 1973, which similarly depicts the project.¹⁹