Thesis: Rebecca Sibinga

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable... know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” - Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

The purpose of the research was to interrogate tools of the speculative architectural future -- megastructures, as utopic future-structures, manifestos as community-building devices, and narrative fictions as a generative hypothetical -- as useful tools for the act of decolonization. Decolonization, as Eve Tuck and K. W. Yang remind us, is a material attack on the embedded systems, supported by mindsets and worldviews of settler colonialism. This attack – if successful -- ultimately culminates in the relinquishing of land ‘back’ to the victims of colonization. However, that is a very distant future; there are architectures between the immediate now and then. To reach that distant future, these architectures must be communal, must be capable of producing a portion of the community’s provisions non-extractively, and must be developed through frameworks of interpersonal consent.

This research culminated in the supposition that hyperlocal interventions are key areas of direct anti-capitalist and decolonial engagement, positioning the decolonial architect as an expert craftsperson, but more importantly, as a resident enmeshed in and cognizant of the political, financial, historical, and social realities of the geographic area. These realities can be then interpreted into spaces that address the needs of an interconnected community, utilizing the pressure points in a changing political landscape as indicators of what priorities must first be addressed with regards to food, health, shelter, safety. Rebecca begins to explore these conclusions through visual stories about the future versions of towns very close to where she grew up, speaking of a community reinventing itself.