As an organization, we have never been a more scattered bunch. Peering through each other’s zoom squares, reflecting on the chaos of the past year, we have found each other to be weirder than we had previously thought. Strangers even to ourselves. Our obsessive sides flourished - we organized, protested, suffered great losses, wrote cards, made bread, gave each other virtual shoulders to cry on. Without the constant rhythm of studio or the proximity of familiar faces, GSAPPX+ has become our venue for assurance and problem-solving. We have also come to realize that our otherness is essential to our identity, reflected in our meetings that can range from a presentation on Perween Rahman’s participatory design to an emotional exercise of “We’re Not Really Strangers.” Our collective alterity is a microcosm of female-identifying designers everywhere, carving out space in the differential between “normal” and “other.”

GSAPPX+ cultivates a discourse that highlights and amplifies a diversity of voices engaged in the fields of design and the built environment. We are comfortable with continually reinventing ourselves; the organization has taken on alternate identities in the past and welcomes doing so in the future to represent its constituents’ best.

Images by Bell Hooks, Carla Llamos, Camille Lanier, and Magdalena Valdevenito