When talking drum becomes part of the dialogue

Four years after curating student work for an exhibition for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial, coleman jordan is back in Italy to construct his own project called “Recall and Response” at this year’s exposition. 

The visiting architecture and art history professor’s pavilion structure — designed to be taken apart and reused — is meant to act as a talking drum that sparks dialogue among attendees of the showcase, which began Saturday and runs through Nov. 23.

“The pavilion is an instrument you can play. It’s a participatory experience,” jordan said, noting that “Recall and Response” examines the solidarity and commonality between African and African diaspora communities. “It’s a space for gathering, a space for people to collect themselves [and] have dialogues.”

The Morgan State University (MSU) professor is one of four visiting faculty at Harvard from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) supported by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative.

jordan, whose work focuses on spaces of the Black Atlantic and decolonizing the Black aesthetic, taught a course called “I Can’t Breathe” in the fall before refocusing on his scholarship.

In regard to “Recall and Response,” the scholar believes the two communities share common ground but that there is also disjuncture in communication.

“Because we’re from different places, [and have] different stories, different context, oftentimes our dialogue is not cohesive,” he said. “We’re not really understanding one another.”

Helping jordan with construction in Venice are students from MSU, and Tuskegee University, as well as his former Clemson University classmate Dan Harding, now director of the Community Research and Design Center and a professor at Clemson.

MSU’s drumline, affectionately known as “The Magnificent Marching Machine,” will march through Venice around jordan’s creation on June 20. The drum culture at HBCUs is significant, jordan noted, and can often play a role in the “identification of a school.”

“The idea is to use the drum as a metaphor for bringing people together,” he said.

Beyond the exhibition at the Biennale, “Recall and Response” will be a physical and symbolic representation of the work being conducted at the Pan African Heritage Museum, which is being built in Ghana. The museum currently exists as an interactive digital space that hopes to eventually house artifacts stolen from Africa during the colonial period.

In keeping with the Venice Architecture Biennial’s theme of “Repair, Regenerate, and Reuse,” jordan said he sees his creation as a way to repair dialogue between communities and regenerate those connections.

The pavilion has taken the reuse aspect of the theme literally, and will be given to a community space to repurpose.

jordan praised the support he received during his year at Harvard and highlighted the importance of sustaining partnerships between the University and HBCUs.

“I think that we can learn from each other’s history, no matter what it is,” he said. “Bridging matters, because we’re in this world together. That collaboration really helps to create that bridge, where our histories start to meld together, and we grow faster.”