Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Angel Island Oratorio | Performance by Huang Ruo, conducted by Wei Cheng, and performed by the Berkeley Chamber Chorus and the Del Sol Quartet (Winter 2022)

Performance excerpts, 3 min; This December 3, 2022 performance of Huang Ruo’s Angel Island Oratorio at Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley, was one of two performances that were the centerpieces of a year of curriculum and public programming about immigration and incarceration called A Year on Angel Island. Along with the February 23-26, 2023 performances of Within These Walls, by Lenora Lee Dance, this oratorio for voices and strings provided UC Berkeley students a chance to perform meaningful works of art as a way to explore challenging topics.

From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from more than 80 countries, most from Asia.  Its administration and detention facilities were built in order to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. Today it is a National Historic Landmark located within the Angel Island State Park.

A Year on Angel Island was a project of the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design and was supported by the Mellon Foundation. Co-directors of the project were Susan Moffat and Lisa Wymore.

The Angel Island Oratorio was commissioned by the Del Sol Quartet with the support of the Hewlett Foundation. It premiered inside the Detention Barracks at the Angel Island Immigration Station in 2021. The 2022 UC Berkeley production was created by:

Huang Ruo, composer

Wei Cheng, music director

Olivia Ting, visual designer

Ky Frances, choreographer

Mia Chong, choreographer

The Del Sol Quartet: Kathryn Bates, Benjamin Kreith, Charlton Lee, and Sam Weiser.

Preventing Erasure: How the Angel Island Immigration Station Was Saved | Ed Tepporn (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 76 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Friday, September 16, 2022 Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public

Speaker:

Ed Tepporn, Executive Director, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

Description: Angel Island in San Francisco Bay is a crucial spot marking the history of exclusionary, race-based immigration policy. Its immigration station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.” But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for half a million newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia. Despite its significance, this important historical site was almost lost. Ed Tepporn will discuss how activists saved this site, current day efforts, and its meaning for the future.

UC @BerkeleyArtsDesign Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.

--

This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration | Julio Morales (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 75 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public Friday, November 4, 2022

Speaker: Julio Morales, Artist and Curator

Description: Curator Julio Morales talks about his current BAMPFA exhibition, Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration, which considers the cultures and institutions of confinement that have been centuries in the making. The exhibition features newly commissioned works based on art historical images of incarceration. The twelve contemporary artists in the exhibition—Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Juan Brener, Raven Chacon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ashley Hunt, Sandra de la Loza, Michael Rohd, Paul Rucker, Xaviera Simmons, Stephanie Syjuco, Vincent Valdez, Mario Ybarra Jr.—invest in community collaboration, work in an expansive range of media, and rethink traditional archival research to consider how artistic expression reveals the underlying logics of criminality and correction.

Julio César Morales, by deploying a range of media and visual strategies, investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales’ practice explores diverse mediums specific to each project or body of work. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced video and time-based pieces, reenacted a famous meal–all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives.

Morales’ artwork has been shown at venues internationally, including; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; MUCA Roma, Mexico City; Prospect 3 Biennale, New Orleans, LA; Lyon Biennale, France, and Istanbul Biennale, Turkey. His work is in private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, and Deutsche Bank, and among others. In May 2018, Morales was awarded the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Contemporary Forum Award, which culminated in a major solo exhibition in 2019. In 2021, a solo exhibition of Morales work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscon, AZ.

--

This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Instructors: Anna Livia Brand, Bryan Wagner

Term: Spring 2019

Course #: Landscape Architecture 154 / American Studies 102

Why Read This Case Study?

New Orleans: Historical Memory and Urban Design, an interdisciplinary research studio, focused on the ways human history and urban design interact over time. Faculty members Anna Livia Brand (Landscape Architecture) and Bryan Wagner (English) led this undergraduate course, which posed fundamental questions: how are cities designed, and how are such designs reshaped over time – benefiting some residents and neighborhoods while imposing lasting harm on others? How can these multilayered histories be peeled back, allowing the roots of violence and injustice to be revealed and contested? And how might place-based resistance strategies reclaim the past and portend the future?

This course took students from a variety of academic majors on a journey through the history of New Orleans’ Black communities. They tracked the progressive marginalization, displacement, and gentrification of these communities, and traveled to the city to explore and learn from local residents and organizations firsthand. Brand and Wagner challenged students to harness their imaginations and creativity to reimagine place-based strategies of resistance and design a map to guide residents and visitors to important cultural events. The studio partnered with the New Orleans Paper Monuments project to create public poster art about sites of deep meaning to the community, featuring individuals, social movements, and historical events that shaped the city’s social geography and landscape. Then, students developed a digital interactive map of Claiborne Avenue, a main throughway through the city’s Black community, locating important sites of resistance and cultural regeneration – historical places, public art, cultural events, and street performances.

In this case study, readers are introduced to the semester-long studio’s structure and pedagogical objectives, can view a rich sample of student creative work, and gain insight into the student experience via a set of reflective essays.

Instructor: Walter Hood

Term: Spring 2016

Course #: Landscape Architecture 203 / City Planning 243

Why Read This Case Study?

Museums are among the most important urban institutions – repositories of art, culture, and history; educational opportunities; spaces of community dialogue; and hubs of community life. Many graduate students are alert to the role of museums, seek to learn more, and are eager to work with – and learn from – museums, as partners in their explorations.

In this graduate research studio, Museum and the City, led by landscape architects Walter Hood and Marcus Owens, students from a variety of disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, art practice, and performance studies, worked with the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) on engaging the community in the life of the museum.

Students studied the origins of OMCA, rooted in Oakland’s Black Power movement and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and its physical manifestation on the shores of the city’s Lake Merritt. With dedicated studio space, student teams explored OMCA’s Brutalist architecture and modernist landscape, studied historical maps, and used visualization – formal design exercises, photography, community mapping, exhibit design – to understand the museum’s relation to the city and adjacent neighborhoods. This studio-based pedagogy, unfamiliar to some of the students, exposed them to a learning model based on teamwork, frequent iteration of ideas and interim work products, and continuous feedback from instructors, fellow students, and OMCA partners. They used new-found design and presentation skills to fabricate interactive installations exhibited on-site at the museum’s popular Friday Night at OMCA.

Instructor: Lincoln Cushing

Term: Summer 2022

Course #: HUM C132 / ENVDES C132

Why Read This Case Study?

Undergraduates often do not carry out independent archival research until they take upper-division courses, if at all. What would be the impact of introducing incoming freshmen, particularly students who are the first in their families to attend college, to the joys and challenges of handling archival documents?

In Archiving as Social Justice Practice, professional archivist Lincoln Cushing taught students not just to use archives but to help create them. Following field trips to the storied archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley as well as to community-based archives, students helped process materials that became part of the Freedom Archives, a long-established grassroots archive in Berkeley. They handled, selected, and digitized historic protest posters and attached metadata, learning important concepts about the practice of history in the process.

The course was supported by Future Histories Lab and offered as part of the Summer Bridge program, which welcomes students from diverse backgrounds, including students of color, low-income, and first-generation students to the college experience in the summer before their freshman fall semester. In their reflections offered in this case study, students said the experience changed the course of their undergraduate careers.

Students who were not even sure they were allowed inside the Bancroft gained the confidence to feel that university resources were theirs. STEM-oriented students gained an understanding of the importance of the humanities; humanities students began to understand history as a discipline; and students oriented toward activism connected their concerns for the future with an appreciation for the need to understand the past.

On 20 May 2014, Brittney Silva, a student nearing graduation from San Leandro High School, was walking along the train tracks to her home and talking on the phone. She was using her earbuds and did not hear an Amtrak train approach. She was fatally struck, and her body was retrieved fifty yards from the impact site.

That same week, I met with San Leandro’s Chief Innovation Officer, Debbie Acosta, to discuss opportunities for collaboration between the city and University of California, Berkeley. With the tragedy of Brittney Silva’s death fresh in everyone’s memory, Acosta urged me to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. When I asked, “How many people walk in San Leandro?” Acosta replied, “We can tell you how much water we use, we can tell you how many cars are waiting at red lights, we can tell you how many streetlights are on, but we have no idea how many people walk where or when.”

That conversation inspired a course I developed with my UC Berkeley colleague Ronald Rael that we called Sensing Cityscapes. In that course, which we offered in fall 2015, we aimed to collect data about human activities that are too often ignored. As part of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative, we aimed to harness methods not just from city planning, engineering, and architecture (Ron’s field), but from the humanistic disciplines, cognitive science, and art (my territory). Our students came from departments ranging from archaeology to public health to performance studies.

The following materials are the product of a studio, sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley, which critically investigated a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. These sites ranged from Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, which exports hundreds of thousands of trade paintings around the world, to Xiaozhou Village in Guangzhou, where local artists and art teachers transformed village houses into studios and galleries, and to the collaborative architectural project of Japanese architect Fujimoto and Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. The studio aimed to analyze the ways in which villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers, entrepreneurs leverage art practices in order to reimagine urban life and urban citizenship. Texts by Winnie Wong and Margaret Crawford, designed by Ettore Santi with artworks by José Figueroa, images and research by Story Wiggins, Xiuxian Zhan, Valentina Rozas-Krause, Sben Korsh; sponsored by the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative.

Read through its most visible characteristics, the neighborhood in the morro (hill) can be anywhere in the peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, and cities of the global South. Its specificities might disappear within general frameworks used to study urban peripheries, including center-periphery dichotomies, informal urbanism, and the essentialized identity of the poor. This portrait, instead, is about the neighborhood as a landscape of multiple histories, where heterogeneity and difference have produced specific spaces, rhythms, and their sensory emanations. Such an ethnographic approach provides a deeper understanding of emergent forms of the periphery assembled around certain visibilities, practices, and subjectivities, and engaged in uneven patterns of democratic city-making.

Collection of Symposia affiliated with Global Urban Humanities and Future Histories Lab.

Teatro Campesino | Kinan Valdez (Spring 2016)

Documentary, 1 minute; Part of the Spring 2016 Mexico City: Materiality Performance and Power Studio Course.

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Instructors: C. Greig Crysler, Angel Marino, and Maria Moreno Carranco.

In a narrow, high-sided concrete courtyard hidden in an outdoor corner of the Brutalist Wurster Hall, Kinan Valdez of Teatro Campesino asked students and faculty to growl and shout; to walk, crawl, and leap; and to engage with props such as ropes and lampshades to reconsider the uses of discarded objects. The “Theater of the Sphere” practice of Teatro Campesino grows out of the company’s roots in Cesar Chavez’ United Farmworkers Union. In the 1960s, Teatro Campesino performed and engaged with workers on flatbed trucks and in union halls, and the company continues to create innovate theater today.

Assistant Professor Angela Marino (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies) had invited Valdez to help prepare students for a research studio trip to Mexico City, where they will investigate issues of materiality, performance and power in a fast-changing megacity. During the workshop, we were struck by how our individual and collaborative motion in the confined gray courtyard transformed a prison-like space of raw concrete into an almost cozy enclave, a home for shared experiments in how bodies relate to architectural space.

In March, the students will travel to Mexico City to pursue research projects ranging from the ethnographic to the artistic, led by Marino, Assoc. Prof. C. Greig Crysler (Architecture), and Prof. Maria Moreno Carranco of the Universidad Autonoma Metoropolitana-Cuajimalpa. As with all Global Urban Humanities courses, the group is interdisciplinary and includes students from disciplines including architecture, art practice, film, geography, literature and performance studies.

Angel Island Oratorio | Performance by Huang Ruo, conducted by Wei Cheng, and performed by the Berkeley Chamber Chorus and the Del Sol Quartet (Winter 2022)

Performance excerpts, 3 min; This December 3, 2022 performance of Huang Ruo’s Angel Island Oratorio at Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley, was one of two performances that were the centerpieces of a year of curriculum and public programming about immigration and incarceration called A Year on Angel Island. Along with the February 23-26, 2023 performances of Within These Walls, by Lenora Lee Dance, this oratorio for voices and strings provided UC Berkeley students a chance to perform meaningful works of art as a way to explore challenging topics.

From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from more than 80 countries, most from Asia.  Its administration and detention facilities were built in order to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. Today it is a National Historic Landmark located within the Angel Island State Park.

A Year on Angel Island was a project of the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts+Design and was supported by the Mellon Foundation. Co-directors of the project were Susan Moffat and Lisa Wymore.

The Angel Island Oratorio was commissioned by the Del Sol Quartet with the support of the Hewlett Foundation. It premiered inside the Detention Barracks at the Angel Island Immigration Station in 2021. The 2022 UC Berkeley production was created by:

Huang Ruo, composer

Wei Cheng, music director

Olivia Ting, visual designer

Ky Frances, choreographer

Mia Chong, choreographer

The Del Sol Quartet: Kathryn Bates, Benjamin Kreith, Charlton Lee, and Sam Weiser.

Cheyenne Concepcion- The Borderlands Archive Installation (Spring 2019)

Documentary, 1 minute; Part of the 2019 Borderlands Archive Installation.

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

On October 9, 2014, Harsha Ram (Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature) discussed his research exploring what happens to (historical) modernity and (literary/cultural) modernism in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, a city remote from the great metropolitan centers of Europe and the West.

This talk was part of the Reading Cities, Sensing Cities colloquium presented by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley.

Zephyr Frank, of Stanford University's Spatial History Project, notes that maps can be seductive, and offers two provocative statements: maps do not have to be beautiful; and ""we should make fewer maps."" As Frank notes, ""maps are not an end point but a means to new thoughts and problems."" Eve Blau, from Harvard's Graduate School of Design, discusses the use of historical maps as a research tool, focusing on examples from Central Europe. "Architecture defined built space.... [but] what you see is not necessarily what is there; if something looks like something, it does not always operate as you expect." UCLA's Diane Favro provides a response to both speakers.

Session One- The Geohumanities Project: What Worked, What Didn’t?

Featuring a group of visiting scholars who labored successfully to produce a transdisciplinary volume entitled GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. The editors reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what lessons came out of the project

-Jennifer Wolch, Dean, College of Environmental Design-Jim Ketchum, Island Press, Washington DC-Sarah Luria, English, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA-Doug Richardson, Association of American Geographers, Washington DC