Mumtaz Hammad is a trans-disciplinary scholar, audio designer, poet, and urban planner. They hold an M.S. in Urban Planning from GSAPP at Columbia University, after receiving their previous M.A. in South Asian Studies from UT Austin.
Their work engages with spatial justice, nightlife design, intercultural planning, liquid infrastructure, and how cultural spaces are located and interpellated in processes of urban planning.
Their writings have been previously published in EFNIKS, Spy Kids Review, URBAN Magazine, Cordite Magazine, and Rest for Resistance. CV may be provided upon request.
FINAL AUDIOVISUAL FOR INTERLACED EXISTENCE - LIFE, DEATH, AND LIMINLALITY: A CONTEMPLATION ON NOTHINGNESS
Audiovisual Poem
Published December 2024
This piece explores “nothing” as the intertwining of oceanic and spiritual architecture through an audiovisual project titled "A Contemplation on Nothingness.” The narrator recites poetry in relation with the vastness and intra-actions held by the ocean's spatial negativity (referencing Barad and Glissant).
Taking inspiration from Daoist philosophy, the narrator steps out of the way and lets the poetics of emptiness, or no horizon, speak for itself– through words and the churning of ocean waves.
Only in releasing our desire for succinct and thorough explanations of nothingness, which always-already escapes the grasp of language, as Barad notes, can we understand poetics of the ocean as a mechanism to explore negativity within architecture. Speculation unfolds not through theory, but through poetry that is once accessible and ungraspable.