Dark Blueprints is a site-responsive spatial method that explores the underside of colonial modernity as a palimpsest of layered architectures across deep time. Inspired by what philosopher Sylvia Wynter describes as “undared forms,” we will challenge existing formats and epistemologies to produce multi-sensorial experimental modes of spatial analysis, emphasizing soundscapes and foodways as sites of cultural preservation. With attention to interspecies ecologies and archival research, together in groups students the activation interrogate the structural intimacies of the built and natural environment that form the island of Mannahatta / New Amsterdam / New York. As one out of more than 40 islands in the New York archipelago, we will listen at the crossroads of stolen land and stolen life across the Western hemisphere, for the multiple overlapping infrastructures of Native, African, Dutch, English, and early American urban life.
