Wilza Silva Mendes

Cosmetic Industry - Hydroquinone

From 2019 onwards, the cosmetic industry started to remove words such as "Whitening," "Fair" and "Lightening" from their skin products, in an attempt to stop sustaining prejudices and stereotypes of beauty ideals. L'Oréal is one of the biggest producers of skin-bleaching products. Upon significant global anti-racism protests, the brand decided to review their skincare products' naming to promote a more inclusive vision of beauty. However, what is the significance of removing "words", when Hydroquinone is still present?

Many of the countries where the distribution of hydroquinone is elevated, such as Jamaica, Nigeria and India, happen to be very tropical environments. High temperatures heighten the risk of skin diseases and the combination of the use of hydroquinone products with high exposure to the sun further accelerates the reduction of the thickness of one’s skin. 

Even with the attempt to stop sustaining prejudices and stereotypes of beauty ideals, this industry and its objectives, have already left a long trail of superficial pressures throughout many generations. In fact, the history of the ideology around beauty has inflicted up the Blackness via many industries and its consequences whether social, political or environmental, were and still are very much significant. 

For instance, the use of ‘Kodak Shirley’ cards represent a technology of photography that was designed on the basis of a global assumption of ‘Whiteness’ as the norm and towards this norm other skin colours were made deviant. There was also the use of Polaroid ID-2 camera for ‘Pass Books’ by South African government, in the time of the Apartheid regime in the 1950’s. This technology was used to maintain a system of racial segregation, and the moment a black citizen was captured by the ID-2 camera this regulation became possible.

Even more generally, the history of Whitewashing for example, in magazines and film, and how the appearance of dark skin was lightened during post production processes. The aim was/is  always to generate more engagement/sales, maximum capitalisation was/is always the main objective, over safety.

In addition,  the emergence of facial recognition and the issues it brought forward, where dark skin is “invisible” to its softwares. These are the very same softwares that mis-recognize individuals in services such as policing, loan decisions and job interviews, lowering their chances at fair identification. 

In all these instances, the industry has made explicit its bias towards global Whiteness. The commercialisation of hydroquinone products, and therefore the capitalisation of the skin, are acts that arise from this notion of the “Normativity of Whiteness”. In this context, Whiteness is used as a way to sell products, inflicting upon the body, materialising such bodies, subsequently creating materialised spaces.

The project will be set in the context of Kingston, Jamaica as it is one of these materialised spaces, it is ultimately part of a much larger selection of contexts affected by Whiteness.

Kingston, Jamaica - The Harm of Matter-less Pollutants

By defining Whiteness as a global pollutant, the different readings of the word "skin" are analysed through the architectural and urban context of Kingston, Jamaica, against its social, geopolitical, and geographical context. 

From the late 1960s, the increasing numbers of urban poor and the need to secure their vote, made housing an area of both genuine social concern and political potential. The Garrison communities are the urban result of that process. 

In (post)-colonial Kingston, segmentation/fragmentation policies—namely on ethnic, social, and cultural barriers—were among the tactics used to rearrange the town demographically. It was done in such a way that the best neighbourhoods or housing complexes, such as Red Hills, Norbrook, Cherry Gardens and Stony Hill, were for a very long time strictly reserved for the white and mixed-race elites. In contrast, the "others" remained confined to the downtown areas of Kingston. 

However, three different events helped to determine the image of the city today. The first was the migration wave during the 1930s economic depression, culminating in the 1950s. This process severely ruptured the ties of many family lives, creating a sizable subculture of displaced and dislocated children growing up in the looser affiliation of secondary family ties.

The second was the development of New Kingston, started during the late 1960s, following a planned move of the financial hub of the old city a mile northward, closer to the residential web of people it was meant to serve. These people consequently moved yet further away again, into Beverly Hills, Jack's Hill, Red Hills, and so on.

A third element was radical, racially motivated socialism introduced during the 1970s under Michael Manley, whose government attempted to reverse the growth of the underprivileged in Jamaica. 

Since independence, the IMF imposed structural adjustments, which influenced the formal/informal split in employment, the persistent housing deficit, the demise of colour/race segregation, and the enduring significance of class and pluralism in the social stratification, the ghetto as a locale of deprivation, violence, and creole creativity.

Structural adjustments included removing tariff barriers that protected the nascent industry from the post-war period, government expenditure cuts, and the opening to international trade. As a result, squatting has remained a marginal condition in Kingston, long associated with the lower class.

The colour-class segregation no longer rules in Kingston. It reduced after the 1960s, especially during the 1970s, but it is broken in a post-modern sense into various microorganisms, urbanely proximate or even juxtaposed. Rastafari has provided a platform for cultural creativity beyond the anti-white, anti-establishment stance of the movement in the late colonial period. Class stratification remains steeply hierarchical, and non-blacks are disproportionately concentrated in the city's elite parts, which is a reflection of its colonial past.

The national achievement in the arts in Jamaica is mostly due to Kingston's Uptown/Downtown dichotomy, two distinct Creole class-culture colour complexes. To feel the void created by colonisation, and subsequently decolonise themselves, they came together. Through the local awareness of each cultural complex's authenticity, both national political parties are multi-class, multicultural coalitions, and finally irrespective of social or cultural characteristics, they have mutually recognised one another. The fundamental spatial distinction between Uptown and Downtown Kingston manifests in many aspects of city life, such as speech and popular culture and the attitudes towards, and the management of, the environment. In part, Kingston has been decolonised not through a systematic state policy but rather more casually through education, the arts, the improvement in the quality of urban life, measured by housing and the sheer absence of whites.

Black Futures

By experimenting with different readings of the word “skin”, the project uses Afrofuturism as a vehicle to represent future visions and architectural interventions on urban spaces, and the different social environments in Kingston affected by the globalisation of Whiteness.

As a mode of operation, Afrofuturism aids in interrogating the architecture and urban networks constructed over the years, over many neighbourhoods. It allows for a conversation that transgresses time and space, so by interrogating its intersectional relationship with Transhumanism, the project speculates on ways human skin can become a translation mechanism which exudes Blackness, infiltrating and shifting the context in which it resides, creating new integral urban landscapes.