Held in conjunction with Sightlines, Ghosts, and Other Stories of the Impossible, this conversation brings together Jess Atieno, Leslie Wilson, and Nekita Thomas to consider the afterlives of architecture and the futures projected through it. Beginning from themes within Atieno’s exhibition—including speculative space, projection, and the instability of imagined futures—the discussion will expand outward to consider how built environments continue to shape memory, representation, and lived experience across the present.

Together, the conversation approaches architecture not only as structure, but as atmosphere, projection, and unresolved promise.

About the Exhibition:

What remains here is not only the buildings themselves,

but the futures they once promised—

futures that were never fully realized.

In the afterlives of independence-era architecture,

that moment does not resolve into the past,

yet those futures remain unsettled.

Brutalist and modernist forms become sites

where past and present operate simultaneously,

holding the pressure of a future

that has yet to settle into shape.

—

Through sculptural works that recast architectural elements

in concrete and incorporate embedded sonic elements,

Atieno approaches architecture as atmospheric and felt.

Printed works situate bodies within these spaces,

where structure and environment remain in ongoing reconfiguration.

The project treats modernism as an evolving formation

shaped by circulation, environment, and lived spatial realities.

In this sense, what persists

is not only what remains,

but what continues to take shape.

About Jess Ateino

Jess Atieno’s (2023 Arts + Public Life Artist-in–Residence) practice engages African modernisms and visual culture through a postcolonial lens, critically examining the enduring imprint of colonial photographic practices on representations of place, home, and identity. Her research interrogates historic images, attending to their spectral presence and the ways they mediate memory, belonging, and dispossession.

Guided by artistic gestures that centre decolonized interpretations of history, Atieno makes time travels through history’s material remains such as photographs, maps and documents, incorporating them into the making of large screen prints and intricate woven tapestries. These acts of remediation do not merely reproduce these images but reanimate them, unsettling their fixity and opening them to new possibilities of meaning.

Atieno employs collage, fragmentation, and material manipulation as strategies to destabilize the photographic field, positioning her work sites of intervention. By engaging the screen print halftone and weaving binary code as visual registers, she constructs nuanced poetic narratives that resist the totalizing gaze of colonial photography. This process unfolds through a haptic collaboration between her body, the silk screen, and the loom— an embodied, multisensory negotiation that challenges the colonial logics of visibility and representation, ultimately proposing alternative ways of seeing and knowing.

About Nekita Thomas

Nekita Thomas is a multidisciplinary experiential graphic designer, educator, and researcher stewarding design for social impact; focused on the intersection of race, well-being, and urban design. Bridging graphic design, tactical urbanism, and civic engagement her research explores designs' capacity to strengthen communities, initiate radical imagining, and amplify civic participation, through the creation of placemaking solutions. Nekita is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.