The Glasgow School of Art

POSTPONED - Unfortunately due to unforseen circumstances this event is to be Postponed. We will let you know when we are able to set a new date. We apologise for any inconvenience 

Invisible Hands of Racism: Structures of Anti-Blackness in our Liberal Society
Dele Adeyemo

Reid Auditorium
Free, but ticketed. Please book here.

This lecture is part of the 'Race, Rights and Sovereignty' series, established as a partnership between GSA Students' Association and The GSA Public Lecture Series, which seeks to celebrate, challenge, inform and inspire the next generation of artists, designers and architects about race, and empower them to have a creative voice. Several events are taking place throughout the academic year, please click here for more information.

This is a talk about the interaction of our unthought internal prejudices and structural racism. This is a talk about how race is a social construction, and how racism is embedded not just in our liberal society and institutions, but also the architecture and spaces that we inhabit in our daily lives.

With reference to architecture, film and personal, lived experience, the presentation will discuss how structural racism is pervasive. Space is never neutral. Greater diversity and representation of black and other minority groups will be welcome, but it's not enough to redress the structural balance of inequality ingrained in our cities. We will explore why we need a shift of focus from the right-wing, overt forms of racism, to recognise the oppression of our personal internal prejusidces, and how they interact with liberal beliefs and ideas around developing the built environment.

In order to fundamentally address the problems of our racialised society, we need to simultaneously look inwards to unlearn deep-seated beliefs; and outwards to decolonise the way we produce architecture and our cities.

This lecture will be followed by a workshop with Dele Adeyemo and Sorry You Feel Uncomfortable: Confronting Complicity, taking place at the GSA Students' Association on Friday, 23 March. For more information, and to book, please click here.

Dele Adeyemo is an architect, researcher and urbanist conducting a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His creative practice mobilises the beauty of Blackness and being as a method of decolonising approaches to architecture and placemaking for the enrichment of all lives in our cities. Previously, Dele co-founded Glasgow-based studio Pidgin Perfect, where he directed culturally diverse creative projects between the UK, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and Nigeria, as well as his practice's presentation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and, more recently, the landmark project Another England, commissioned by Historic England to map 100 years of our Black & Asian heritage.