CARE AS UNDOING

In the many forms we call ‘education’ has there been a measure of learning produced for the undoing? The subtraction, and reduction of what is known or easily accepted as knowledge, into its primitive being: the hull, the mold, the sketch, the root, all that came before to produce what is. For our current project of reality, and especially that notion of reality that is informed by what is accepted as truth, from the material source of what constitutes the production of truth, or knowledge– the institution, or “VeRiTas”-- what tools of undoing might we begin to employ to expose, unearth, visibilize, and renew those knowledges that composed the basis of the institution, as opposed to the outfall that has produced knowledge as the material forces of what we know. Such inquiries should not be endless, but instead rigorous.

We approach the task of care to be the act of making anew what was, in the recognition of the banal violence of the regime of knowledge production as an insufficient contemporary to what could likely be. The strata of individual action amassing the collective practice of each discipline can be broken, examined, and crushed to expose the calcified presence of sacrificed bodies, lands, and worlds to present the visage of an organized, objective truth. At the ground of our feet lie fragments of bones, skulls, flesh taken as instrumentation to fulfill the ‘inquisitive’ or ‘confirmatory’ prejudices of experts. As process, this production of knowledge has altered itself in response to what is deemed common practice, or morally acceptable through time. Yet, the chronology of this occupation for extraction from subjects to justify knowledge’s desire to affirm its own bias has continued onwards today. We ourselves are inculcated in this genealogy, not solely as inheritance, but as contemporary practice. The status and gravitas of being here is entwined with a desire to learn from, if not contribute to this strata. To become, at the expense of disposing of who had to become undone, or never was allowed to be. The reputation of the College is a superposition to all other knowledges. It rise far ahead, above, and is omniscient in commanding an authority that is unquestioned: at its core, Harvard is the impasse of progress. It is to remain. The quadricentennial reign of the first college in the American colonies welcomes you to its presence, and you are to leave with the ability to utilize its power. It is fixed.

In the mass grave of lost epistemes, how might a retracing of how this fixedness became accepted as reality do more than expose harm and injustice? We are concerned for more than an intellectual critique, a compilation of wrongdoings, and an archive of brutalizing death that has been espoused as truth. Instead, we stand to give name, to give visibility, and to reorient each fleck of matter within the strata into its own unveiling of self. Once disintegrated into its respective parts can we suspend each subject into the fullness of its being to achieve something more than the flaccid, planar attempt at rendering the flattened crystalline. In our pursuit of this making anew what was, what is in fact, as all matter is living, we must disallow the institution as the polestar in the narrative. We are directed not by its obvious violences and instead to document the subject’s and their descendants’ attempts to reconcile this subjectivity. The design is the undoing and the archive is the remaking: to retell the truth as it was and not as it was constructed.

The ethic of care is a prepense for active truth telling. As ritual and ceremony, our exegesis makes care a practice of wholeness, or dismembering the facade of truth and bringing forth the undercommons of knowledge at the core. We are to bring care into this work as a composition of questions, investigations, collections, and reinterpretations of the initial layer of strata into the endless levels of accumulated ways of knowing that have been co-opted, and resold to us as knowledge. As if lost to us, we dive into the strata to reclaim this molecularity as the universal. To take each and every perspective that was rendered competitive to the dominant narrative, and hold them in space together. This plurality of knowing truth at its source, as its embody coded, uncovered or unbridled in its misrepresentation for ulterior, and nefarious pursuits of the disciplines, we can make claim to knowledge as the curation of knowing all that can be known. There is not one truth but rather the capacity to discern what truth is closest to its source. The primordial activates itself as more than a condition of genesis—awaiting the transformation of some alienated tool, formula, structure, experimentation, iteration, or any other ‘method’ of the totalizing knowledge— and rather the entry into understanding.

To learn how to discern and to make reality anew is a form of survival that subject’s take up always as a means of continuing against the crushing weight of the strata’s need for eradication. Care requires a committed practice of understanding and of embodying the right to primitivity, the right to bring disintegration into the modernizing whole, to hold individual context as the pluralistic pursuit of wholeness.

GROUNDING

ABSTRACT

This work emerges from embodying visibility, acknowledgment, and reconciliation as forms of care necessary for an institution to rectify its past. Centering Indigenous wisdom, community empowerment, and sustainable development, our group frames care as a healing process; one that acknowledges historic injustices and amplifies registers of community resistance. The land is embedded with memories of past times and past harms. It is living, and as a living entity, it is rarely afforded the space to grieve, process, or heal.

What places, people, and matter has Harvard usurped in making itself?

How has this process been invisibilized? Who do we bring forward?

The erasure of these histories perpetuates harm and denies both the land and its people the possibility of reconciliation and peace. Without focusing solely on what has been lost, we aim to revitalize and share spaces that hold multiple identities, fostering spatial solidarity. By making the invisible visible, our work seeks to restore communities and ecologies disrupted by colonization and urbanization, offering healing through both land and community.

Revealing and highlighting historical and contemporary cultural erasure and harm, particularly those related to Harvard’s history, we envision an immersive, multiscale installation engaging with the legacies of Black and Indigenous cultures. Through visual projections, soundscapes, and archival materials, we aim to expose these layered histories and provoke reflection. Cultural placemaking becomes a form of education, historical recognition, and an opportunity to spatialize solidarity and healing. By activating specific spaces across the campus, our work not only restores what has been disrupted but also offers a vision of reconciliation, where the land, its people, and its histories are given the opportunity to heal.

BIOGRAPHIES

Brianda Cerda (Master in Landscape Architecture), Sonja Angst (Master in Design Studies), and Tyler White (Master in Urban Planning and Master in Design Studies) are three design students forged by a collective interest in the pursuit of unveiling histories of injustice as it relates to Black, and Indigenous communities in the United States, as form of solidarity building, public exposition, and a practice of care that seeks to heal space through historic reckoning.

The three design students forged their collective work through coursework with Senior Loeb Fellow Malkit Shoshan, and her course: Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices.

Fall 2024