Latest / Luxury. Culture. Capital. / Luxury, Class, and the Architecture of Belonging

Transcript

Luxury, Class, and the Architecture of Belonging · Luxury. Culture. Capital.

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Before Frida Escobedo designed the new modern and contemporary art wing at
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: she designed my home, a five-story townhouse in Colonia Popotla in Mexico City.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of her early and few residential works.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not Polanco.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not Roma.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not Condesa.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Not Juarez.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Popotla.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: A neighborhood most foreigners will never know of.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And many Mexicans can't place.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's why I chose it.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't move to Ciudad de Mexico to inherit a social script.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I moved here to learn how one gets written.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Class is a dirty word in America.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It makes people cringe because it exposes what we often hide beneath taste,
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: access, race, education, merit, or ambition.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: But class is older than race in one of the deepest laboratories for human experience.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Back in Atlanta, class announces itself from across the room.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Cosmetic surgery, cars, brand signatures, followers.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But Mexico City,
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: the oldest capital city in all the Americas, is teaching me something different.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Here, class is more layered and coded by neighborhood,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: accent, nationality, family, architecture, language, ease, and time.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike in America, class doesn't pretend to be fluid.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Here, its structure As a Black American woman,
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also being read here through foreignness,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: beauty, and assumptions I don't understand yet.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at once Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: My presence is visible before I ever speak,
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: but when I speak solid Spanish, the reading shifts again.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: This Escobedo home has become one of my deepest studies of class,
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: luxury, how they exist in the psyche, what they do to the body.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: When guests walk in, there's always awe.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: But awe is not one thing.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: It manifests as reverence, intimidation, or even resentment.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Recently, I shared my guest space for rent in a WhatsApp group.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The conversation became a violent debate about class,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: belonging,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: foreignness, price,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: neighborhood perception,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: who is allowed to live inside beauty,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: and, I quote, how much Black Americans are permitted to be out of survival mode.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: The house provokes.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The neighborhood provokes.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: The cost, the value, the story, the why.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Selecting this home was difficult.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: When I first considered living here,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: my former housemaid asked, Ama, what is wrong with you living in the house?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Who are you being humble for?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a real question.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why is luxury treated as the contradiction of humility, of solidarity?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Luxury is not only what something costs.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Luxury is what a culture knows how to recognize, protect, resent, translate, or make room for.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I am studying how beauty signals,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: how culture is treated as business intelligence,
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: and rare ideas are given the time and structure to become real.