architecture agency

In Othering and Othered, co-authored with Ana Martinez, we situate excerpts from Japanese-American internee’s memoirs—about the spatial conditions of the WWII era internment camps, their work, their movements from place to place, and their sense of being bothered—and our drawings based upon historical documents and photographs in relation to the recent executive order and its repercussions. We propose text as not only  textus—written accounts and treatises—but also text as materially fabricated, from texere, as a “thing woven, joined, fit together.” In our weaving threads of text together we invite the reader to perform their own weaving between past and present narratives. Our text as textile takes as its framework the historical textiles—camouflage-netting—woven by citizens interned within the Manzanar and Santa Anita camps during WWII. Our intention, through the superimposition of memoirs, executive orders, and drawings is to place the past blurring of truths, states of anxiety and misguided judgements in resonance with our current socio-political context.