Before it was a park, it was a forest. A marsh forest on a floodplain and high ground along the Spree, tracing an ancient glacial valley that flowed from present-day Warsaw to Berlin. The fifteenth century saw it fenced off as a royal hunting ground, a dense forest enclosed by a growing city. By the eighteenth century, landscape architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff carved out a baroque order from the woodland: allées, green rooms, and salons. It would be Peter Joseph Lenné, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, brought about the order that most resembles the Tiergarten of today. He thinned the woods, made clearings, and introduced water streams for drainage. Later still, under the Third Reich, it became a place for parades and demonstrations of the perversity of power. The winters of 1945 and 1946 were uncharacteristically cold, and freezing Berliners felled more than 200,000 trees for firewood.[1] It was replanted in the 1950s under the guidance of park director Willy Alverdes, who sought to restore the site’s primaeval qualities through ‘six distinct plant communities typical of the Berlin region.’[2] What emerged was a place of exceptional biodiversity, with nature negotiating its own terms within the plan.
An exterior, in the weather, at the threshold between the Tiergarten and the building. On approach to the building: a pool of water. The reflecting pool bears two names, one on each side: Fannie Lou Hamer and Violeta Parra. A Mississippi sharecropper and a Chilean folk singer, each born in 1917, each spent their lives making freedom through song and organizing, making culture from conditions meant to break them. The water doesn’t separate their names—it holds them in relation, while a divided bronze sculpture by Henry Moore floats above. Behind the building, skirting its edges, the Spree river runs in its channel. To enter, you can walk around the pool (on either side) or take the Gloria Anzaldúa Stairs over it up to the Les Nana Benz Terrace above. These women create the navigation.
The building is Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). When it opened in 1957 as the Kongresshalle (congress hall), it was a gift from the United States to West Berlin; its roof, a curved concrete shell, was designed to demonstrate what democratic architecture might look like, what openness could be when built into form and made visible from across a divided city. It collapsed in 1980, killing one person and was rebuilt by 1987, just two years before the Berlin Wall fell. In 2023, the institution undertook a renaming initiative (‘Resignifying HKW’), bringing in Gloria Anzaldúa (stairs), Lorenza Böttner (offices), Lydie Dooh Bunya (space), Nise da Silveira (offices), Hedwig Dohm (entrance), Lili Elbe (garden), Semra Ertan (garden), Forough Farrokhzad (garden), Safi Faye (hall), Marielle Franco (space), Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Zakia Ismael Hakki (room), Fannie Lou Hamer (reflecting pool), Bessie Head (foyer), Magnus Hirschfeld (bar)[3], Ika Hügel-Marshall (entrance), Jacqueline Kahanoff (offices), Les Nana Benz (terrace), Miriam Makeba (auditorium), Mrinalini Mukherjee (hall), Paulette Nardal (terrace), Beatriz Nascimento (hall), Itō Noe (entrance), Bibisara Oripova (driveway), Bertha Parker Pallan (space), Violeta Parra (reflecting pool), Sharmila Rege (entrance), Nawal El Saadawi (entrance), Anna Seghers (garden), Angie Stardust (foyer), Maria Katrina Stenberg (room), Ceija Stojka (foyer), Gunta Stölzl (foyer), Teresia Teaiwa (room), Awa Thiam (offices), Haunani-Kay Trask (hall), Sylvia Wynter (foyer), He-Yin Zhen (foyer), and May Ziadeh (library). The names are there now, installed into wayfinding, signage, online maps, and programmes; the infrastructure of approach and entry. They mark thresholds that the building was not originally designed to hold. The Hedwig Dohm Entrance names the nineteenth-century German feminist whose demands for suffrage and economic independence were only realized at the very end of her lifetime (she died in June 1919, having lived to see it after having spent almost fifty years of her life demanding it). The entrance announces what you will encounter: an incomplete project. Freedoms promised but not yet delivered. But before you reach that threshold or any door, there is the pool that now carries Fannie Lou Hamer’s name.
A Mississippi sharecropper in the Spree basin. Hamer died in 1977; she would never see her name like this.
Part I: Mississippi waters. Berlin waters.
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children in a sharecropping family. She picked cotton from age six. Twenty rows a day by age thirteen. The work meant bodies bent low, hands moving fast, the cotton sack dragging behind growing heavier through the heat. This was the landscape: Delta flatness, the horizon line broken only by the levee, occasional trees, and the slow curve of the river in the distance. Everything was organized around cotton—the fields, the labour, the debt, the violence that kept the system turning.
In 1962, she was forty-four years old when she attended a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in Ruleville. By then, Hamer knew intimately what sharecropping meant: working land you could never own, incurring debt you could never escape, watching the profits from your labour go to someone else. At that meeting, civil rights activist James Forman spoke about the right to vote and what it might mean to register and claim a voice in how things were run. Hamer said later that she hadn’t known Black people in Mississippi could register to vote. She had never been told this was possible.
That August, she tried to register. Plantation owner W.D. Marlow told her to withdraw her registration or leave. She left. That night, the house where she was staying was fired upon—sixteen bullets through the windows. In June 1963, returning from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina, she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi. In the jail cell, she was beaten by two Black prisoners who were forced to attack her on the order of white officers. The beating left her with permanent kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and a limp. She was forty-five years old.
Hamer became a field organizer for the SNCC. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, challenging the all-white regular Democratic delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Her testimony was televised, and millions watched her describe the beatings, the firings, the night riders, the systematic exclusion. ‘If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now’, she said, ‘I question America.’ She spoke plainly with the weight of what she had endured and what she refused to accept: ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ The phrase entered the language, circulated, and became shorthand for a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t lead to surrender but to refusal.
In 1969, she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County—an attempt to reclaim land in the Delta, to establish collective ownership, to grow food for people who were hungry, and to create a different relationship to the soil than sharecropping had allowed. At its peak, the cooperative farmed 640 acres and provided for families throughout Sunflower County and beyond. It was land-based organizing, a material claim to the territory that had extracted so much labour for so long. The cooperative struggled financially, being dependent on donations it was vulnerable to the economic forces that had always shaped the Delta. By the mid-1970s, it had largely ceased operations.
Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. She was fifty-nine years old. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, but voter suppression continued. Black political power in the Delta remained constrained. Economic inequality persisted. The land question—who owns it, who works it, who profits from it—remained unresolved. Hamer died with her demands for freedom unrealized, though not abandoned, nor forgotten.
The Mississippi River Delta was Hamer’s geography—a landscape shaped entirely by water. The river built the Delta over millennia, depositing sediment, creating the flatness, fertility, and richness of the soil. But the river also destroyed; floods came regularly and violently, remaking the landscape, displacing populations, and erasing what had been built. The Great Flood of 1927 inundated 27,000 square miles, displaced over 600,000 people, and killed hundreds. Hamer was ten years old. The flood revealed the structure of Delta life—who was forced onto the levees to sandbag, who was held in refugee camps under armed guard, and who was prevented from leaving so that labour would remain available after the waters receded. The National Guard kept Black sharecroppers from evacuating, ensuring white plantation owners would still have workers when planting season came. Water was deployed as a weapon, an instrument of control, even—especially—when it appeared uncontrolled.
Delta water was also used for irrigation, and the canals and ditches that fed cotton fields made the crop possible. It was the humidity that made the work harder, the heat more unbearable. It was the cycle: spring floods, summer drought, fall harvest, winter rains, spring floods again. Time in the Delta moved with water, measured by its presence or absence, its predictability or its violence. In spite of human interventions, the Mississippi water remained essentially uncontrolled, cyclical, and dangerous. You could not live without it, nor could you live safely with it. It was never simply background—it structured everything, determined what could be planted and when, shaped who lived where and under what conditions of precarity. This is the water Bessie Smith sang about in ‘Backwater Blues’ (1927): ‘Backwater blues done cause me to pack my things and go / Backwater blues done cause me to pack my things and go / ‘Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’.[4] The lyrics recount the impact of the flood—forced movement, loss of home, the impossibility of staying. But they also communicate the blues response using blues structure: pack your things, go, survive, sing about it, make the survival into sound.
The Spree River in Berlin tells a different story. Channelized, regulated, its flow managed by locks and weirs constructed over centuries, it served as industrial infrastructure for a modernizing European capital. The river powered mills, transported goods, defined districts, and marked boundaries. Where the Mississippi moved according to seasonal rhythms—spring melt, summer low water, fall rains—the Spree was managed for consistency, its levels maintained, its course fixed. During the Cold War, spans of it became a de facto border, dividing East and West Berlin. Its waters were surveilled, its crossings monitored, and people who tried to swim it were sometimes shot. The Spree was rationalized, made predictable, conscripted into the service of the state. Even its seasonal variations were tempered by upstream dams, by engineered systems designed to eliminate uncertainty. Where Mississippi water was about survival in relation to forces beyond human control, Spree water was about control itself—about the engineering capacity to regulate nature, to make it serve political and economic ends, to eliminate its unpredictability and therefore its danger. Two rivers, two hydrologies, two relationships between people and water and power.
Hamer’s pool is neither the Mississippi nor the Spree. It is a third hydrology, what Clyde Woods might recognize as ‘blues’ water, that emerges from and explains the contradictions between these two systems. Woods describes blues epistemology as ‘a knowledge system indigenous to the United States that is expressed through an ever-expanding variety of cultural, economic, political, and social traditions. Embedded within the blues tradition are highly developed and institutionalized forms of philosophy, political economy, social theory and practice, and geographic knowledge that are dedicated to the realization of global social justice.’[5]
The blues doesn’t resolve contradictions—it holds them, works through them, makes them navigable through sound, form, and the structures it creates for processing what cannot be escaped. Hamer’s pool operates the same way: contained but not controlled, its edges defined by concrete and stone but its surface constantly transforming. Fixed, but not static. Wind moves across it, creating ripples and distorting reflections. Rain disturbs it, adding volume, breaking the surface into a thousand small impacts. Light changes it, hour by hour, season by season. This body of water is artificial, intentionally placed and maintained. No naturalized landscape here, no attempt to disguise construction as organic emergence. The pool announces itself as built, as infrastructure, as intervention.
What the pool reflects, what it must reflect, what it cannot avoid reflecting: Berlin’s weather, which is often grey, the sky a uniform sheet of cloud that turns the water flat and silvered. Sometimes piercingly clear, the blue intense, the clouds distinct and moving visibly across the water’s surface. The Tiergarten’s trees, planted after Berliners stripped the park for firewood in the brutal winters of 1945 and 1946, when the city was rubble, people were freezing, and survival meant burning whatever would burn. The building’s glass and concrete facade, the curved roof, the modernist confidence of the form—Cold War architecture that believed openness could be engineered, that democracy could be built into a roofline. And Henry Moore’s Large Divided Oval: Butterfly (1985–86), floating, appears suspended on the surface where the bronze meets the water.
Approaching the entrance, one sees oneself reflected among all these other elements, inserted into the composition whether they intended to be or not. These reflections don’t clarify—they accumulate, layer, complicate. You cannot see just one thing in the pool. Everything appears together, superimposed, the building and the trees and the sky and the bronze and your own face, all visible simultaneously, all present on the water’s surface. The pool refuses a singular focus. This is what Christina Sharpe means by ‘in the wake’—the space where ‘the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.’[6] The pool is wake in multiple senses: a memorial, a funeral wake for Hamer, a space for grieving what was lost, what was taken, what remains unrealized. A disturbance, the wake in water from Moore’s bronze, from rain, from wind, from movement—the surface carrying the trace of what has passed through it or over it. A demand for consciousness, for wake-fulness, for attention—those who would enter the building must be awake to this, must see it, must navigate it.
Simone Browne writes about racializing surveillance, how technologies of watching emerged from the management of enslaved bodies on ships, in fields, in cities—how surveillance has always been racialized and has always served to monitor and control and track Black movement.[7] But Hamer’s pool inverts this logic. The institution is now reflected, surveilled, watched. The building cannot avoid seeing itself in water named for a woman whose life was shaped by surveillance, by the watching of overseers and bosses and police and registrars who determined who could move where, who could work, who could vote, who could speak. The pool performs what Browne calls ‘dark sousveillance’—watching back, from below, from the position of those who were meant to remain invisible, meant to be observed but never to observe, never meant to reflect the gaze back toward those who watched. Every time light hits the water, every time someone approaches, the building sees itself next to Hamer’s name. The institution sees its own reflection in her water, implicated in the histories it now aims to address, confronting the distance between what it was built to be and what it says it wants to become.
Part II: Navigation as Blues Practice
Violeta Parra was born in 1917 in San Fabián de Alico, Chile, the same year as Hamer, half a world away. A singer from a young age, she grew up in rural poverty. By the 1950s, she was travelling throughout Chile gathering folk songs—tonadas, cuecas, payas—songs that campesinos sang, songs that were vanishing as rural life disappeared, songs that held memories of other ways of living. She didn’t just collect—she performed, recorded, taught, and composed. Parra made music that insisted on the dignity of rural and Indigenous life against the pressures of modernization and urbanization, forces that wanted to erase those ways of being.
In 1955, she travelled to Warsaw for the World Festival of Youth and Students, then moved to Paris. She performed at the Théâtre des Nations, recorded albums, and exhibited her arpilleras—textile works that used traditional techniques to depict political and social conditions. She returned to Chile in 1965 and established La Carpa de La Reina, a cultural centre in a working-class neighbourhood of Santiago where she could perform outside institutional control. The centre struggled financially. In 1967, she died by suicide in La Carpa. She was 49.
Her songs became anthems of the Nueva Canción movement—music that was explicitly political, that organized, that made solidarity audible across Chile and beyond. ‘Gracias a la Vida’ (1966), her most famous composition, has been sung in protests, in movements for justice, in moments of grief and hope ever since. The song names what remains even in the face of loss: thanks to life, which has given so much. It’s a blues structure—stating what persists, what cannot be taken, even when everything else has been.
Hamer sang too. Freedom songs at SNCC meetings, in churches, on marches. ‘This Little Light of Mine’, ‘We Shall Overcome’—songs that held the movement together through sound, through bodies singing together. Both women made freedom through voice and the insistence that song could do political work, could make solidarity material, and could keep people moving when conditions said stop.
Now, together, their names frame water in Berlin. Hamer and Parra signify two different approaches to the same threshold, two different women whose organizing practices emerged from song, from making culture under duress. Or, you take the Gloria Anzaldúa Stairs. Anzaldúa describes nepantla as ‘the Náhuatl word for an in-between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or gender position to another, when travelling from the present identity into a new identity.’[8] It is not the stairs that are literal nepantla, but the state of one who occupies them while moving across them. To cross over these waters, you move through the state Anzaldúa names. You are suspended between ground and entrance, between outside and inside, between Hamer’s water and Parra’s water, neither fully arrived nor departed. You can see Moore’s bronze from above, the Tiergarten’s trees from a distance, and the Spree behind you.
Anzaldúa writes about la herida abierta, the open wound where two worlds meet. The US-Mexico border was her primary geography, but she understood the concept more broadly: any threshold where worlds press against each other, where difference doesn’t resolve into sameness but remains difference held in painful proximity. The stairs hold you in this space. Below: Hamer and Parra’s water. Ahead: the building. Behind: the city, the park, the life you came from. You are between, navigating the crossing.
This navigation happens outside, ‘in the weather’ as Sharpe names it—the total atmospheric condition of anti-Blackness that cannot be escaped but must be lived in, navigated, endured. No climate-controlled passage exists between the street and the entrance. Berlin’s rain, wind, cold, and heat touch your skin while you read these women’s names on signage designating the respective spaces. The institution cannot eliminate the weather.
The pool enforces improvisation. Cyclical, not linear. Blues time. Not progress toward resolution but return, repetition with variation, the same changes played again. Spatial call-and-response: the pool calls, your navigation answers, and the route you take interprets the demand.
Part III: Division as Blues Structure
Henry Moore’s Large Divided Oval: Butterfly (1985–86) floats in the reflecting pool. Bronze, substantial and heavy, bifurcated, but not completely. The sculpture sits low, dark against its reflection. One ‘wing’ mirrors the other in shape and curve, but they don’t touch, held in relation by the element that divides them. Moore was 88 when he died in 1986, when the work was still in the foundry. He had been working in bronze for decades and understood its weight, its capacity to hold form against weather and time. Bronze weathers to green patina but doesn’t erode. A butterfly lives for weeks. He titled something meant to outlast everyone who would see it after a creature defined by its ephemerality. Moore was interested in organic form, in how transformation happens incompletely, how metamorphosis can be arrested mid-state.
In 1977, nine years before Moore’s bronze first entered this water, Hamer died. Her body had been worn from decades of cotton field labour, from the beating in Winona, Mississippi, that damaged her kidneys. From the Highway Patrol and local police who beat her and other activists in a jail cell in June 1963 (she was 45 then, and the damage was permanent). She was 59 when she died in Mound Bayou, in the same Delta where she was born, where she organized, where she tried to create the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She was buried there. She never left Mississippi, never travelled to Europe, never came to Berlin.
21 May 1980. Seven years before Moore. Part of the building’s roof collapsed. The causes were multiple: corrosion-induced cracking in the roof structure, errors in planning and construction compounded over time.[9] A journalist conducting inspections was seriously injured and later died. By 1987, the roof was rebuilt. The building reopened two years before the Wall fell, two years before the Cold War context that generated the Congress Hall collapsed. Built to demonstrate western superiority and to showcase US cultural power, it seemed to have outlived its purpose, for by 1989, that argument no longer needed to be made in quite the same way.
How do we hold these histories together? The Mississippi Delta and Cold War Berlin. Jim Crow era organizing and European modernist sculpture. The violence that killed Hamer slowly, the violence that killed quickly when the roof collapsed. Water that shaped cotton field drainage and determined who could farm where. Water that divided Berlin, when crossing the Spree during the Cold War meant crossing between worlds. Moore’s aesthetic interest in division and transformation. Hamer’s forced knowledge of how segregation splits communities, families, and access to resources.
Maybe we can turn to Fred Moten to read these (re)configurations and understand blues structure not as a general theory of contradiction, but a specific methodology emerging from Black radical practice—from the break of the Middle Passage, from slavery, from the ongoing violence of anti-Blackness.[10] Blues structure is about making something from what’s been stolen, creating in the wake of rupture, continuing under conditions that were meant to make continuation impossible. The break that becomes invention. The violence that produces improvisation not as choice but as necessity.
Hamer’s organizing exemplifies this. Excluded from the Democratic Party that claimed to represent her, she and others created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Not integration into the structure that refused her, but a new structure made from that refusal. In her 1964 testimony at the Democratic National Convention, she stated the condition: ‘Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives are threatened daily?’[11] Then she made her demand, making freedom of and from and within unfreedom. In blues structure, the twelve-bar blues is divided into three groups of four bars. The AAB lyric structure operates thusly: statement, statement, shift.
A statement ‘I woke up this morning, feeling sad and blue /
A statement I woke up this morning, feeling sad and blue /
B shift I didn’t have nobody, to tell my troubles to.’
Division made productive not by choice but by necessity. A form that allows moving forward when a condition persists.
Blues structure. Here, we read Hamer, and her name transforms what this site means. The butterfly didn’t inherently carry this significance. Moore made it as a formal exploration, an aesthetic contemplation of incompleteness. But, years later, it floats in water that now bears Hamer’s name, and so the sculpture enters a different field of meaning. It now lies between the histories of Mississippi and Berlin, between the violence Hamer survived and the architecture built to proclaim freedom. These distances do not collapse.
This is what we have to reckon with now: navigating incommensurable histories without flattening them into equivalence or false opposition. Blues structure is the methodology that makes this possible—not by resolving what can’t be resolved but by creating the form that allows continuation and confrontation, that insists on connection across distance that remains. What happens, Denise Ferreira da Silva asks us, if we suspend the presumption of separability? What if we take connection, not separation, as our starting point for understanding all things?[12]
Part IV: The Threshold
The resignifying project names places and spaces after women whose demands have not yet been realized, whose work remains incomplete. Fannie Lou Hamer and Violeta Parra’s names are outside HKW and hold a threshold. The ‘not yet’ has been made spatial. The blues temporality has been made architectural. The condition that persists is the freedom that hasn’t yet arrived. A freedom that can no longer be deferred.
Multiple forces intersect at this pool. First, spatial counter-narratives: incompatible worlds held in proximity. A Mississippi sharecropper, a Chilean folksinger, and a German, state-funded cultural institution, blues epistemology and European rationalism, uncontrolled Delta floods and regulated Spree channels. Second, infrastructural decolonization: renaming as spatial intervention, not a symbolic gesture. Hamer’s and Parra’s names are now embedded in the building’s wayfinding and signage that visitors regularly engage with. Third, the irony of location: radical figures who spent their lives refusing complicity with power now have a relation to a structure built to project US Cold War power. The constitutive contradiction made architectural. The tension these forces generate produces what might be understood as productive instability. The building cannot fully assimilate their names—Hamer and Parra remain counter-narratives, resistant to any attempt to appropriate their legacies, to smooth them into something more comfortable. Yet a name cannot escape the building either, now embedded within the very infrastructure of approach and entrance. Katherine McKittrick writes that ‘Black matters are spatial matters’ and Black geographies emerge through politically charged ideological landscapes that (often) Black women (must) struggle to reclaim.[13] The pool is such a landscape: impossible (these women should not be here, geographically or institutionally) yet actual (they are here, their names are here, undeniable).
This productive instability is not failure—it is method. The pool does not resolve the contradiction between the building’s Cold War origins and its current aspirations toward decolonial practice. Instead, it renders the contradiction architectural, something that must be encountered through the body. Visitors move through unresolved tensions: between modernist confidence and postcolonial critique, between the ordered ecology of the Tiergarten and the open scars of borderlands, between commemoration and complicity. You cannot settle into a coherent narrative here. The water keeps reflecting. The bronze stays divided. Hamer’s and Parra’s freedom remains unrealized, though their names are now enshrined.
The pool becomes a kind of blues architecture—it explains, critiques, and addresses through what the body encounters rather than what signs announce. It teaches us what Hamer and Parra learned and came to know. Freedom is not a destination but a practice. Freedom is a resolution, an ongoing encounter with impossible terrain.
[1] Sandra Bartoli, ‘Introduction’, in Tiergarten: Landscape of Transgression (This Obscure Object of Desire), eds. Sandra Bartoli and Jörg Stollman (Zurich: Park Books, 2019), 8.
[2] The replanting scheme targeted six community types characteristic of the Berlin region according to his research: pine forest, oak-hornbeam woodland, and white willow-poplar floodplain forest among them. Alverdes structured these through successional planting stages drawn from plant sociology—fast-growing pioneers (ash, birch, poplar) would create growing conditions for slower species (beech, oak), provisionally present until the longer-lived framework could establish dominance. Ibid.
[3] The Magnus Hirschfeld Bar is the only space at HKW that was named prior to the 2023 Resignifying initiative, having been referred to as such since 2015. Eds.
[4] Bessie Smith, ‘Backwater Blues’ (1927), quoted in ‘Marilyn Chin on Bessie Smith’, Poetry of America, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/audio-recordings/poetry-of-america/item/poetry-00001020/marilyn-chin-bessie-smith/.
[5] Clyde Woods, ‘“Sitting on Top of the World”: The Challenges of Blues and Hip Hop Geography’, in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, eds. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Adrian Woods (Toronto, Cambridge: Between the Lines, South End Press, 2007), 48–49.
[6] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 9.
[7] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
[8] Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘Border Arte: Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera,’ in La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience, exhibition catalogue, ed. Kathryn Kanjo (San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 1993), 119.
[9] As evidenced in the official report from December 1981, which can be found online. While the report is in German, an English summary can be found on page 5 of the PDF. Arno Plank, Werner Struck, and Manfred Tzschätzsch, Forschungsbericht 80: Ursachen des Teileinsturzes der Kongreßhalle in Berlin-Tiergarten (Berlin: Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung (BAM), 1981), https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/files/370/fb80_vt.pdf.
[10] Here, I am drawing on Fred Moten’s concept of ‘the break’ from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), which theorizes both the historical rupture of the Middle Passage and slavery and the improvisational aesthetic practice that emerges from and persists within this condition. While Moten does not use the term ‘blues structure’, his insistence that Black radical practice operates through ongoing breaking rather than dialectical resolution informs my use of the term here as a specific methodology rather than abstract theory.
[11] Northwest African American Museum, ‘Fannie Lou Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Speech’, 1964, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFC1nc3IXBM.
[12] Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘On Difference Without Separability,’ in 32nd Bienal de São Paulo: Incerteza Viva—Live Uncertainty, exhibition catalogue, eds. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 64–65.
[13] Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii.