Summary

This presentation anchors a core ambition of the ArchLabour project: shifting the historical lens from elite technicians to the anonymous workforce of colonial public works. Specifically, I will try to bring women’s mass and technical labour into the light. For decades, patriarchal archives normalized male expertise, writing female workers out of the construction site. By treating institutional records – from payrolls to photos – not as passive data but as spaces of exposure, I will try to push past official erasures. I will look closely at the rare traces left by female architects and segregated builders alike, recovering a history of agency that the colonial bureaucracy tried to silence.

Full Programme

MONDAY 26 OCTOBER

Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture [Exhibition opening]

Opening lecture by Kathleen James-Chakraborty: “Challenge the Canon: New Perspectives on the Dissemination of Modern Architecture in the United States”

TUESDAY 27 OCTOBER

Fragile Memory
Presentations and Roundtable by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anne Hultzsch and Ana Vaz Milheiro; Hélène Jannière and José Parra-Martínez