Platform for Architectural Transfers in the Indian Ocean rim
About | Conversations | Collaborations
About | Conversations | Collaborations
Institutions: Colonial and Postcolonial
12th November 2026, 5.00 pm IST
> Registration link <
Robin Hartanto Honggare
(National University of Singapore
Ana Vaz Milheiro
( Dinâmia’CET-Iscte University Institute of Lisbon)
Amanda Achmadi
(University of Melbourne)
12th November 2026, 5.00 pm IST
> Registration link <
Robin Hartanto Honggare
(National University of Singapore
Ana Vaz Milheiro
( Dinâmia’CET-Iscte University Institute of Lisbon)
Amanda Achmadi
(University of Melbourne)
Labor in Motion, Labor in Station
The history of labor migration is largely, to echo PATIO’s aspiration, a history of transfers: labor, skill, and knowledge moving from one place to another. The labor migration supporting commodity production in colonial Sumatra is one such case. By the early twentieth century, plantation companies had moved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of indentured laborers from China, India, and Java across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to supply workforces for some of the world’s largest tobacco and rubber plantations. Their role was indispensable; the indentured were the planters in the actual sense, the people who planted seeds and cared for plants. Their movement constituted the transnational and transimperial networks to which modern Western empires owed their wealth.
Labor in motion, however, entailed labour in station. Plantation managers and migration officers stopped, checked, selected, documented, isolated, and at times dismissed potential workers at different transitory nodes before they arrived at plantation estates. If architectural history has something distinctive to offer to the study of labor migration, it is its capacity to zoom in on those nodes to understand how the plantation system controlled its most important resource. Thinking both along and against flows, I examine the construction of labour mobility that sustained the region’s commodity industries, a process involving a constellation of buildings in more than one hundred locations, from Semarang to Hong Kong, to facilitate the systematic documentation and selection of labourers as well as their transportation.
Labor in motion, however, entailed labour in station. Plantation managers and migration officers stopped, checked, selected, documented, isolated, and at times dismissed potential workers at different transitory nodes before they arrived at plantation estates. If architectural history has something distinctive to offer to the study of labor migration, it is its capacity to zoom in on those nodes to understand how the plantation system controlled its most important resource. Thinking both along and against flows, I examine the construction of labour mobility that sustained the region’s commodity industries, a process involving a constellation of buildings in more than one hundred locations, from Semarang to Hong Kong, to facilitate the systematic documentation and selection of labourers as well as their transportation.
ArchLabour: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour
Perspectives and Methods for Researching Colonial Architecture
How can we rethink the history of colonial architecture by placing labour at its centre? The ArchLabour project investigates the role of mass labour in the design, planning and construction of public works in former Portuguese colonial territories, exploring the social, technical, material and spatial dimensions of colonial construction.
This presentation introduces the project’s research questions and approaches through a selection of case studies spanning Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Macau, bringing African and Asian contexts into dialogue. It explores how construction labour was shaped by socio-racial classifications and migration, gendered divisions of work, the circulation and adaptation of construction materials and methods, and the (re)appropriation and erasure of colonial infrastructures. Alongside these case studies, the presentation discusses ArchLabour’s methodological approaches, including archival research, drawing, fieldwork, training and collaborative exchanges. It considers how studying labour can expand architectural history beyond buildings and their designers, towards the people, practices, knowledge and power relations involved in the making of colonial built environments.
This presentation introduces the project’s research questions and approaches through a selection of case studies spanning Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Macau, bringing African and Asian contexts into dialogue. It explores how construction labour was shaped by socio-racial classifications and migration, gendered divisions of work, the circulation and adaptation of construction materials and methods, and the (re)appropriation and erasure of colonial infrastructures. Alongside these case studies, the presentation discusses ArchLabour’s methodological approaches, including archival research, drawing, fieldwork, training and collaborative exchanges. It considers how studying labour can expand architectural history beyond buildings and their designers, towards the people, practices, knowledge and power relations involved in the making of colonial built environments.