How Ideas Are Built

Most of us encounter finished ideas. We read the article, visit the exhibition or attend the lecture. By the time they reach us, the work feels complete.

What we rarely see is everything that came before it.

The reading. The conversations. The notes in the margin. The footnote that opened an entirely new direction. The months spent returning to the same question.

I’ve come to believe that this hidden part of research is often the most interesting—not because it’s where answers are found, but because it’s where understanding changes.

BlindianProject has always been interested in what happens when people gather around an idea. Exhibitions, films, Reading Rooms and Reconstruction Studies all began with the same question:

What becomes possible when people think together?

Over the last year, that question has shifted.

I’ve found myself becoming just as interested in how ideas are built as the ideas themselves.

Reconstruction Studies had already become the primary way I explored those questions.

They rarely begin with diagrams.

They begin with an encounter—a photograph, a sentence in an academic paper, a family archive, a conversation that refuses to leave you alone.

Earlier this year I took part in Black Kings and Pirates: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Power, Inheritance, and Refusal, a study group organised through the School of Instituting Otherwise by Meenakshi Thirukodi and taught by Wendell Marsh.

One of the practices Wendell introduced was collaborative annotation using Hypothesis. Rather than reading in isolation, we read together, leaving questions, observations and connections directly on the text.

The paper itself didn’t change.

Our relationship to it did.

Someone noticed something I’d missed.

A footnote became another week’s reading.

The margins became as interesting as the text itself.

I left the study group wondering whether that way of working could become part of BlindianProject.

Then I realised it already had.

The study group didn’t change the work itself.

It changed how I thought about sharing the process behind it.

It introduced me to an infrastructure for making the work before the finished work collaborative.

That’s why I’ve been building Reconstruction Lab.

Reconstruction Lab is a shared research practice.

Each cycle begins with a shared text.

Sometimes that’s an academic paper.

Sometimes it’s an artwork, a film or an archival document.

Together we’ll annotate, ask questions, follow references and build on one another’s observations.

Eventually, four statements kept returning.

• Reading is private.

• Annotation makes attention visible.

• Conversation moves attention between people.

• Reconstruction changes what becomes possible.

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They’re less a theory of reading than a description of the practice we’re trying to build.

We’ll begin with Carissa Chew’s Remembering Interracial Intimacies: South Asian Perspectives on Black/Brown Sex and Romance in Colonial East Africa, the paper that shaped the most recent Reconstruction Study.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens before the finished work, I hope you’ll join us.

Requests to join Reconstruction Lab are now open.

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About the Author

Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American artist, writer and founder of BlindianProject. His practice explores how race, migration, memory and colonialism shape the conditions of everyday life through film, installation, writing and public humanities.