This project creates a notated ground plane linking geography and time through the lens of migratory routes of the global slave trade, as well as flow patterns of goods and services. The installation spatializes past, present, and future, revealing Africa as the emergent geopolitical force that will shape the future of the world.

The Hair Salon centerpiece imagines the African community and its diasporic cultures as a unified and cohesive community in the form of a circular field of kinked and copper tubes that stand in for Black hair strands as an extension of the Black body. (For purposes of this project, Blackness is defined as those with recent Sub-Saharan ancestry). The circular field of tubes simultaneously suggests a collective diasporic crown and the community itself. The Hair Salon centers, rather than marginalizes, Blackness as a cultural/technological force that can transform our collective futures for the better. And, because science tells us that on an anthropological level, we are all African, the Hair Salon posits itself as the originating universal creative space. The proposed temporary installation will live on as an online platform for the discussion about Blackness as a powerful cultural, aesthetic, and intel- lectual force and will host live conversations about Black hair care practices and the translation of those practices into architectural material, surfaces, and physical architectural systems. The project offers the opportunity to expand the conversation about Black culture, its relationship to technology, and concepts of translation and meaning making.