Speak of the Devil: Reflections on the Institutional Co-Optation of Language

This text originated from a conversation had around breakfast, in the Funambulist’s office in September of 2024. Akil and Seth Scafe-Smith were telling us why their architecture office, RESOLVE Collective, did not enter the Grenfell Tower Memorial competition in London, describing how British institutions had co-opted our language. We asked them to reflect further on this institutional co-optation and the spaces left for us to resist it, or even part from it and invent a new language.

“The power of literacy to make us fit for struggle should be exercised like a muscle, not waved around like a membership card.” The words of abolitionist and prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in The Funambulist’s “A Moment of True Decolonization” podcast series in 2020, are increasingly resonant today at a moment of genocide and overlapping permacrises—when many of us are questioning the value of gathering stones at a time of scattering them. Though a minor footnote in the texts of the existential struggle our kin are engaged in—from Palestine to Sudan to Kanaky—there is some relevance still in observing the role that languages and literacies of this struggle are playing not in the gym but in the guild. Today in Britain’s institutional landscapes, from museums to universities to architectural competitions, the terms that have for decades sought to articulate resistance to oppression by marginalized people are being progressively declawed; used not in commitment to the politics but the semantics and aesthetics of liberatory struggle.