Native(s) Lifeways
Walter Hood (Fort Bragg, USA, 1958)
lives and works in Oakland, CA, USA
Alma Du Solier (Monterrey, Mexico, 1972)
lives in San Francisco, USA and Mexico City, Mexico and works in Oakland, USA
Michael DeGregorio (Philadelphia, USA, 1985)
Paul Peters (New Westminster, Canada, 1981)
Erasure threatens the Black cultural landscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Lowcountry. Wetland development and diminishing rural land tenure endanger these ‘native’ cultural landscapes, which stretch 12,000 square miles from North Carolina to Florida, forging a dialectic between the enslaved Gullah Geechee people, plantations, Carolina Gold rice, sweetgrass baskets, and Africa.
Descendent of its adjacent plantation landscape, the 1,000-acre rural agricultural settlement of Phillips is today a modest residential community along the historic Route 1. The landscape beyond its small area of cultivated land is called the ‘overgrown’, rife with native ora such as pine, oak, and palm.
Native(s) suggests that Phillips can be born again. It reconsiders the word ‘native’, exploring an alternate vocabulary to critically think about new hybrid formations of Indigenous and foreign landscapes.
Authorial collaborators
Lewis Watts (Photographer), Julie Dash, Geechee LLC, Rachael Watanabe- Batton (Contradiction and Struggle)
Technical collaborators
Tipping Structural Engineers, ArchDesign Custom Fabrication, Annacaterina Piras, LW Circus-Onlus, Alicia Silva Canton (Translation)
Team
Sarita Schreiber, Kelley Johnson, Olivia Hansberg, Chris Derry, Grace Mitchell Tada
With the additional support of
University of California, Berkeley; Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Department, Farrand Fund Grant in Innovation; United States Artists 2021 USA Fellowship; Giulia Floriani
