THIRD SPACE* Studio
THIRD SPACE* Studio is an art and research-led interdisciplinary architecture practice. We establish our theoretical standpoint amongst our post-modern and post-colonial predecessors, as one of dialogue, mediation and hybridity.
THIRD SPACE* Studio © 2023
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01.
Mapping Migrant Trajectories: a Study of South Asians in Diaspora (2022), Mohsin Ali
RIBA Medal Commendee
Manchester School of Architecture
United Kingdom
Research supervised by Dr. Huda Tayob at the University of Manchester.
Images of the Belle Vue Studio in Bradford, and its highstreet products.
This research paper looks to the reconceptualisation of the B. Sandford Taylor Photography Studio (also known as the ‘Belle Vue Studio’) on Manningham Lane in Bradford as a trans-global high street space in a post-colonial dialogue between centre and diaspora. The studio is analysed as an architecture of memory, diaspora, and of transversal dialogue, through dialectical readings of the studio’s archive portraits. These readings ascertain the complex migrant geographies and histories to tell of the formation of a South Asian-British identity in Bradford, and largely support existing post-colonial discourse around how new diasporic ethnicities form as a mediation between global geographies.
Image of the collaborative ethnography generated via participatory drawing workshop with South Asian migrants in Bradford.
The research uses ethnography as a language in articulating these dialogues, with the study arranged around a participatory workshop with first and second-generation Pakistani migrants in Bradford as collaborators in reading the archive. The participants’ readings found that the high street space can be recognised as an entire world of exchange, where global territories, identities, and spatial histories of South Asian diasporaisation intersect. This study therefore contributes the complex spatial, historical, and geographical arcs that are embedded within the high street and its products, to uses them as precedent for understanding the street as an actor within an entangled international system of postcolonial mobility for the South Asian diaspora.
