what is a school?
Curated by secret poster club
83 Grand Street
New York
Through September 1
What does it mean to speak truth to power? And what capacity do universities in the United States, whose existence is predicated on the bloody spoils of settler-colonialism, have to challenge power? What does effective resistance by students and professors against genocide, apartheid, and racial capitalism look like on college campuses, or perhaps off them?
A new exhibition at a83 in New York probes the same antagonisms scholars like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, bell hooks, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Ilan Pappé, and others have explored in years past. what is a school?, curated by secret poster club, debuted on August 16. It showcases a body of work made by an anonymous group of New York architecture students founded last January. The exhibition features research and ephemera about Palestine that Columbia GSAPP students would have liked to present at Avery Hall, but couldn’t.
“Columbia University demonstrably invests in arms shipments. It invests in a number of groups that actively enact occupation and genocide in Palestine, among other places,” one secret poster club member shared. “So for this end of year show, we weren’t interested in showing off the things in our portfolios. We wanted to center the ongoing genocide happening in Palestine. We felt like we had a responsibility to do this as students.”
The Back Story of what is a school?
what is a school? was first envisioned by its clandestine curators last winter. It was around that time when secret poster club was helping organize walkouts and boycotts of Columbia. Then in May, Columbia GSAPP administrators announced its end of year show would be held online amid campus protests for Palestine. Afterward, secret poster club took matters into its own hands, culminating in the show now on view at a83.
“Our original plan was to put all of these protest posters up on the walls at the end of year show,” another secret poster club member told AN. “But when they moved the show online, we started thinking about doing this in other spaces.”
The exhibition now on view at a83 contains installations from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, as well as Cooper Union Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and other allied groups. This content is paired with workshops by Jelisa Blumberg, Lexi Tsien, Layal Srouji, J. Eunsun, Khloe Swanson, Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz Garcia, and Leopold Lambert by invitation of a83’s Owen Nichols and Clara Syme.
“Students were really frustrated with the way in which the end of year show was handled by the school,” Owen Nichols told AN. “So secret poster club approached us about doing an alternative end of year show that wouldn’t be possible at [Columbia]. We thought this was a great fit for us because we’re not tied to any institutions and there’s no policing here.”
“secret poster club took over the space for about a week,” Nichols continued. “They used our printmaking and risograph machines. The Columbia students were really inspired I think by how the Cooper students moved their end of year show off-site to the Clemente.”
On View at a83
what is a school? doesn’t pull any punches, and it names names. It calls out Columbia University’s punishing response to pro-Palestine protesters by former president Minouche Shafik, and the silence of Columbia GSAPP dean Andrés Jaque. It takes over a83’s two galleries.
The big room at a83 features a timeline of Palestine’s colonization by British, Israeli, and U.S. forces. It also has a spiral-shaped chronotropic diagram that reveals Columbia University’s relationship to settler-colonialism. This is accompanied by risograph posters with poetry by June Jordan and words by Edward Said, a “people’s library” stocked with anti-colonial books, and other items that come together to tell a story about resistance and liberation.
The public-facing front space also has a printer so that curators can add more images to the walls as time goes on, a feature which conceptually fits with a83’s mission as an active print studio. “The exhibition isn’t frozen in stone, it’s constantly evolving. That’s one of my favorite things about it,” Nichols said. “That’s what agitprop has always been about; just getting information out.”
Meanwhile, a small room in the back contains fliers from Columbia University protests. The fliers on view were by pro-Palestine protesters, several of which were defaced by zionists. These papers have been stored by secret poster club members, until now. They constitute a living archive of the campus protests that had the world talking. A photograph of Andrés Jaque is taped between the big and small rooms matched with letters written by students asking Jaque for his help, but to no avail.
The feeling of disappointment and anger is palpable at a83. This rawness manifests in what is a school?’s curatorial style; secret poster club printed images using a laser printer, and the captions are handwritten on pieces of tape. This makes a83 feel like an inhabitable punk zine. The space is designed for horizontal conversation that challenges power as opposed to a didactic incubator at the service of power; the former is what a school should be, and the latter is what academia has become.
“I think we’re all really disillusioned and disappointed in our school, and the education we’ve received at GSAPP,” one member of secret poster club told AN. “For this alternative end of year show, we weren’t interested in just putting our work on the walls. We wanted to create a welcoming space for self-education, collective research, and resources. We’re thinking about ways that we can intervene in and supplement our education. And honestly it’s been surprising and inspiring to see how many people wanted something like this. The feedback we’ve been getting has been really emotional and encouraging.”
Against Gaslighting
One flier that hangs in the back room gets to the core of what a83’s show is all about. It says: “TOPICS COVERED AT GSAPP: Transcalar Visions, The Politics of Heterotopic Space, Designing Around Queer Slowness, Progressive Fugitives, Deconstructions and Language, Actions and Phenomenology, Trans/Post Humanisms, War and New Monumentalism, Anthropocene and Decay, FREEING PALESTINE.” If the first nine subjects sound utterly superfluous, and the last one gravely serious and topical, that’s the point. The flier mocks the “radical pedagogy” Columbia GSAPP touts in contrast to Shafik’s McCarthyist response to student protests.
“The administration at Columbia has been gaslighting students while many faculty have been absent,” Iowa State University professor Nathalie Frankowski told AN. “The show is revealing because now we can hear from students their own version of what’s happened, and their own voices. What is on view at the show is a more accurate depiction of these events than what we can see online,” Frankowski, who also teaches at Columbia GSAPP with Cruz Garcia, continued.
“The institution has its narrative of what happened. We see this in the emails administrators sent, in what they testify in Congress, in The New York Times, and other propagandist media,” Garcia shared. “It’s really brave and principled what the students did. They shared their own narrative. They exposed many levels of the aggression they received, and how their reality has been denied.”
“Why can’t a space like this be at GSAPP?”
secret poster club evokes Edward Said at several intervals throughout the show. The classic photo of Said hurling a rock at IDF soldiers, for instance, is one of the first things you see. This evocation is an apt choice, given that Said spent his career at Columbia University’s English department, and that he himself was a victim of settler-colonialism’s malice. Said’s office was set on fire in 1985, but Columbia University never found the culprits. This is reminiscent of the attacks and death threats more recently against Samia Henni, an Algerian historian of architecture who is vocal about her support for Palestine at Cornell University and ETH Zurich respectively.
Not long after Said’s office was ablaze, he wrote a polemical essay doubling down on what he believed in. Said famously wrote that the intellectual “belongs on the same side with the weak and the unrepresented” and that the intellectual should “unearth the forgotten.” These quotes appear in risograph prints at what is a school? as tribute to Said, Frantz Fanon, etc. Thus, what is a school? is testament to the real antagonisms that exist between people like Said and the Ivory Tower which employs them. How does one go about effecting change from the belly of the beast?
“We often wonder: Why can’t a space like this be at GSAPP?” a secret poster club member shared. “Why did we have to create this? It’s really not that radical. We’re just talking about the things here that we should be talking about. We actually invited lots of faculty members to this exhibition, and many didn’t show up. It’s been really stressful. We’re worried about being suspended, expelled.”
“It’s cliche to say that everything is architecture,” secret poster club continued. “But architecture is political, and Palestine is something architects have a responsibility to pay attention to. The wall that separates Palestine is architecture. The land that Israelis take from Palestinians, and the buildings that are being built on that land is architecture. These are all design decisions. But of course this isn’t just happening in Palestine. It’s happening in Harlem. It’s happening to every minority group and marginalized people around the world. I think it’s an absolute delusion to say that we should not be learning about these problems. Architecture has so much power.”
