Peripheral Office

SSSAD X: Nicole X Jenn Read, listen, and learn more at 🔗sssad.space/nicolexjenn #SSSADTranscripts #SSSADX #asiandiaspora

Nicole x Jenn | Date: April 21, 2024 Jenn on Nicole: “Nicole and I have crossed paths a few times over the last few years serendipitously, and I was curious to learn more about them given our shared background in landscape architecture. SSSAD was the perfect opportunity to connect to learn more about their perspective and creative inspiration across their public-sector work, design research, and artistic practice.” Read the transcript and listen to the full clip at 🔗sssad.space/nicolexjenn #SSSADTranscripts #SSSADX #asiandiaspora

SSSAD X: Sruti X Sophie Read, listen, and learn more at 🔗sssad.space/srutixsophie #SSSADTranscripts #SSSADX #asiandiaspora

CW: Brief mention of suicide. Please take care before listening. SSSAD X: Sruti Suryanarayanan (they/them) interviewed by Sophie | Date: April 14, 2024, 3pm PT Sophie on Sruti: “I’ve had the honor of growing up/growing radicalized next to Sruti—we met as first-year students during the Pre-Orientation Service Experience (POSE). After participating, we both became POSE leaders, and subsequently we both got tattoos of the logo. Since our time at RISD, Sruti has been practicing in the world as a designer, theorist, organizer, and cultural worker committed to resisting oppression and building better worlds. Every time we reconnect, I learn so much from them!” Read the transcript and listen to the full clip at 🔗 sssad.space/srutixsophie #SSSADTranscripts #SSSADX #asiandiaspora

SSSAD X invites past narrators to interview an Asian diasporic creative in their own network: someone with whom they share a close connection or someone they’re in community with and would like to know better. This approach advocates for storytelling as an intimate, relational practice dependent on mutual trust between the narrator and the interviewer. The listener is never neutral, and any project theorizing knowledge of a collective body calls for many story listeners as well as storytellers. We’ll be sharing new interviews bi-weekly-ish starting this week here and at 🔗sssad.space Thank you, so much for tuning in. #SSSAD #SSSADX #asiandiaspora

Our book, Challenging Patterns of Supremacy, published by MAS Context @mascontext , is finally out in the world! Thank you to all of the students, faculty, collaborators, makers, schemers, dreamers, and world-builders who helped us to the finish line. Link in bio for purchase & look out for upcoming DMU conversations near you. 🪐🌱 This book is a transcript, a conversation, a guide, an example, a reference, an archive, and hopefully many more things to many people. It takes, as a point of departure, the transcript of a lecture by the five of us (DMU members Bz Zhang, Lisa C. Henry, Shalini Agrawal, Shawhin Roudbari, and Tonia Sing Chi), given in September 2022 at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, at the invitation of Berkeley architecture students. Following the lecture, we hosted a workshop where we applied frameworks that addressed power structures and issues identified by students from both Berkeley and California College of the Arts. After these events, we held two virtual panels with DMU organizers from across the country in dialogue with MArch students. The original lecture represents both our individual perspectives as five members of DMU as well as the collective work and insights of hundreds of built environment practitioners, scholars, students, and organizers. The text incorporates perspectives from additional DMU members who were not present in the lecture hall. Here we expand on the lecture with additional references, build on it through a series of exercises to support activism and reflection, and experiment with the book as a medium—in both form and content—for challenging patterns of supremacy. We invite you to join us in the margins and take space across entire pages (and beyond them) in shaping these conversations, and we look forward to imagining and building the futures and worlds we have been dreaming of together. Authors: Bz Zhang, Lisa C Henry, Shalini Agrawal, Shawhin Roudbari, & Tonia Sing Chi Copy Editor: Anna Alves Design: Dave Pabellon Publisher: MAS Context & DMU Printing & Binding: die Keure, Brugges, Belgium Support: Graham Foundation @grahamfoundation , University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Utah, & DMU.

Hi! This Sunday, I will be biking in the Ride for Palestine, an annual fundraising project of the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA). MECA works to protect the lives, rights, and well-being of children in Palestine and refugee camps in Lebanon. As the enormity of the genocide in Gaza continues, our support is needed more urgently than ever. All funds raised by the Ride will go to MECA’s relief work in Gaza. @mecaforpeace @rideforpalestine I love this 14 mile bike ride so much because it’s accessible to people of all ages, abilities, and skill levels (awesome fact about me - I didn’t really know how to ride a bike until I was 33!) We are all needed and we can all have a role. If you can make a contribution, I would be so grateful. Link in my bio to donate. Appreciate you all so much. ❤️💚🖤

A year and a half ago, we (Bz Zhang and Tonia Sing Chi) wrote an article “Is There Such a Thing as Asian Diasporic Architecture?” for the October 2023 issue of Architect Magazine guest edited by Dark Matter U. We ended the piece with an open invitation to spatial designers of the Asian diaspora to join us in conversation by sharing your stories through an online survey. To our surprise, some of you answered! Following October 2023, this survey faded quietly in the background. Lately, we have been feeling the pull to (re)connect with our pods and strengthen our commitment to solidarity practices. WE ARE RELAUNCHING THE SSSAD SURVEY in hopes of reconnecting with you—and connecting you to each other. Responses will be collected for an initial phase through the end of 2025. Please contribute by then to be part of the first round of reflections and knowledge sharing that will shape future resources, conversations, and collective actions. Link in bio to take the survey. Please join us in conversation and help us spread the word! ❤️

Soft launching a substack (even though I don’t know anything about how to use it) because I’m not sure how much longer this account will keep me connected to the people I want to connect with. Join me at sssad.substack.com (linked in bio). I have been working on Season 2 (which I am very excited about) among other SSSAD things and would love to share it with you.❤️

A snapshot of our Rammed Earth Hearth Workshop in June for @naatsiilid_initiative . In this 3-day hands-on workshop, we explored rammed earth construction–a building technique that involves compacting locally available, natural, raw materials such as clay soil, sand, and gravel into a temporary formwork to create solid, monolithic walls and other forms. Participants learned to build a rammed earth hearth with a fireplace insert and bench, integrating the sacred element of fire into their homes using traditional earthen building materials found in the Diné landscape and building techniques from the region. Rammed earth also offers several advantages, including thermal stability, fire resistance, low embodied energy, and the beauty of natural materials. 🤎 It was a joy to work with our incredible instructor @anantam.ap and the NI team to offer this free community workshop in our Sweat Equity Homes Project. #earthenconstruction #rammedearth

Transforming @petalumabounty ’s La Tercera Community Garden with Girls Garage Advanced Design-Build. Together, with 12 incredible students, 2 alumni, and 5 instructors, we built a shade structure, potting table, and garden beds for the local community in our week long summer build.🌱 Adirondack chairs and mosaic tiles (which will be integrated into a gravel path through the garden) built and created by the @_girlsgarage Young Women’s Design + Building Institute earlier this summer. 💫 I adore being part of this magical space @emilypillotonlam @augustasitney @allisonoropallo @hahallie have lovingly built and nurtured over the years. It’s a gift to advocate for food justice, self-determination, and girls/non-binary youth in design and building with people and places you love.💜 #girlsgarage #designbuild #youthdesignbuild #communitygarden

Anyone who has worked with oral history transcription knows just how labor-intensive and slow the process can be when conducted with care. Over the past year and a half, I spent an average of 30 hours “bearing witness” to *each* narrator. This involved everything from preparing and conducting the interviews, to transcribing (the most labor-intensive part), sending transcripts for review, making revisions, copy editing, selecting video clips and quotes to highlight, publishing to the website, and creating social media content. I experimented with a process that challenged the notion of researchers as neutral, unbiased, and objective by interviewing only those with whom I had a personal and working relationship—people I was deeply biased towards and invested in. My hope was to move beyond extractive power dynamics and root the process in relational trust and accountability. Thank you to dear friends and colleagues who participated in SSSAD Season 1! It was an honor and joy to spend so much time with each of you, even if it was just me on my end! I know it was uncomfortable for many to watch themselves on video and hear their own voices, and I’m deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me to care for your stories and amplify your brilliant voices. These semi-structured interviews, where I asked similar questions to each narrator, will guide me into the next phase of this project. I’m looking forward to discovering through lines and sharing them in meaningful and engaging ways, theorizing the knowledge held within our diaspora/design communities, and continuing to explore storytelling as a relational practice. Thanks to anyone who followed along or appreciated any part of this project thus far. ❤️ Storytelling Spaces of Solidarity in the Asian Diaspora (SSSAD) is supported by the @grahamfoundation #SSSADTranscripts #asiandiaspora