Resistance Architecture, The Breathing Room, 2019-ongoing
The Free Town Field Build was a design-build workshop organized by the teachers’ collective Project Fielding to create Resistance Architecture with and for members of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, an alliance of artists and activists who organize to imagine a world without prisons and police. Project Fielding defines Resistance Architecture as a series of structures designed and built to uplift the work of social justice organizations engaged in long term political protest or encampment. Resistance Architecture is built by workshop participants and is designed in consultation with partner organizations including the International Indigenous Youth Council, STOP (Southside Together Organizing for Power), Sweetwater Foundation, and for this build, the #LetUsBreath Collective.
This iteration of Resistance Architecture is a new imagining of the Freedom Square occupation held in the summer of 2016 which will be used for a longer occupation called Free Town that will begin in the summer of 2020. At Freedom Square, the #LetUsBreathe Collective launched a 41-day overnight encampment to protest Homan Square, the CPD “black site” where thousands of Chicagoans have been illegally detained and tortured. As described by the Collective, the occupation “grew into a community laboratory for police abolition and divestment, providing free clothes, free books, free meals, free arts programming for the children of North Lawndale, and free sleeping tents for community members, protestors and neighborhood residents experiencing homelessness.”
The Free Town Field Build began with Project Fielding teachers listening to members of #LetUsBreathe to understand their vision and to anticipate needs for Free Town. The group then interpreted that dialogue into construction plans. The design process was fueled by the #LetUsBreathe Collective’s powerful vision and use of metaphor in structuring their resistance. They spoke of expanding circles and spheres emanating outward from, and retracting toward, a central core. From such movement one can imagine the expansion and contraction of the lungs in a slow breath, a growing flame from which sparks emanate to kindle other fires throughout the community, and the cycle of seasons where verdant growth occurs in the fertile summer months while dormancy and restoration occurs during the winter months. Project Fielding responded to these metaphors with two designs:
- Four identical, modular and adaptive open-frame wooden structures that can stand alone or be connected in various configurations. These easy-to-move structures can be adapted for use as greenhouses, gathering spaces, shade, libraries for clothes or books, kitchens, etc.
- Two wooden-frame and human-powered carts whose structures mirror the larger shelter. These carts can be used by the Collective to expand outward from the central occupied site to bring their activities into the larger community.
Twenty femme-identified and nonbinary builders came together over a period of nine days under the guidance of the Project Fielding teachers to learn practical woodworking skills while constructing the four shelters and two carts. Workshop participants included members of the #LetusBreathe Collective, Project Fielding alumni and newcomers from the Back of the Yards community and around Chicago who were interested in developing skills and/or supporting the work of #LetusBreathe and Project Fielding.
