Please join us for a conversation with Ilze Wolff and Andil Gosine moderated by Felicia Denaud (University of Cincinnati). In this dialogue, Ilze Wolff and Andil Gosine will explore how ecology shapes their practice and thinking. Specifically, they will contemplate how ideas of nature, architecture, race, sexuality, and plants are intertwined.
Thinking with Ecologies of Elsewhere is presented by the Contemporary Arts Center, University of Cincinnati, and Taft Research Center.
Andil Gosine (PhD, MPhil, BES) is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto. His research, writing, and artistic practices explore imbrications of ecology, desire, and power. Dr. Gosine's latest book Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean was recently published by Duke University Press, and is the basis of a forthcoming exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas. His curatorial projects include "everything slackens in a wreck," which was presented at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York last year, and "The Plural of He," which will open at the Leslie-Lohman Museum next February.
Ilze Wolff co-directs Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, a practice concerned with an architecture of consequence. Their built work includes public infrastructure projects, cultural educational buildings, exhibition architecture and urban interventions of repair and restoration. Coupled with this, Wolff has developed an enduring yet critical public culture around architecture through initiating exhibitions, film projects, public interventions and publication. Her research is acclaimed and she is the author of the award winning 2017 book ‘Unstitching Rex Trueform, the story of an African factory’ a biography of a Cape Town modernist garment factory and its entanglements with societal constructions of race, gender and class. She teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in the capacity as visiting adjunct professor for Spring 2023. For her work she was shortlisted for the 2018 Architectural Review’s Moira Gemmil award for emerging architects and has been invited to deliver a Current Work Lecture hosted by the Architecture League of NY and The Cooper Union. She is the co-founder and editor of the publication and research platform pumflet: art, architecture and stuff which focuses on the black social and spatial imaginaries. pumflet has featured in various local and international platforms such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), the Centre for the less Good Idea (2018), Chimurenga, Institute for Creative Arts UCT (2019), Performa NY (2020) and Luma Arles (2022). Wolff regularly presents her research practice in talks, essays and exhibitions in various forums globally including the Architectural Review, e-flux architecture and the Architectural Design. She has a passion for spatial practice and its potential as a site for emancipatory practices of care, embedded research and prophetic organisation.