The Interview

 “Housing is foundational for the migrant’s sense of inhabiting and occupying a home in the city of immigration. Modifying, reconfiguring or recrafting the architecture of the house to better fit the migrant’s dwelling habits provides a passage of transition from migrant towards citizen subjectivity.” (Lozanovska, M. 2019, Migrant Housing).

VASILKA:
Thank you, Professor Mirjana Lozanovska, for agreeing to be interviewed by Kalliope X. I believe that it’s important to ground the discussion, so tell us about your migrant journey, your departure from Macedonia, and arrival in Australia, in the context of settlement.

MIRJANA:

I was born in Ohrid, Macedonia. My parents were looking for somewhere to live in Macedonia, and because of the kind of list of who gets housing, they could not get any housing. So, they were looking to migrate somewhere. They were looking to Sweden, and then Australia was campaigning for migrants, big time, and there were several people they knew that had already come here. My dad left first in 1966, without explaining what he was doing, so it was quite traumatic, even pre-migration, in terms of the father. Then we departed for Australia.
When I arrived and saw my father, I was shocked. I was a bit angry, I think, because I thought, so he is alive.

VASILKA:
What were your first impressions, or first contact, first encounters at that time?

MIRJANA:

School became my safety zone, given there was a lot of drama going on in the rest of our lives, like migration. We had moved into a single-fronted terrace in Rathdowne Street, with lots of migrant neighbours, so the primary school I went to was Lee St.
When my mother took us to school, my younger sister, who had never left my mother’s side, cried and cried, screamed the whole school out. I was incredibly embarrassed. She had to join my class, because she wouldn’t go away from me, she sort of stuck to me. I was incredibly fortunate that a young girl, Michelle, took me under her wing, because I had no English, no language, not even the concept of language, except I thought Serbian was different to Macedonian, so I tried to speak Serbian as a way of communicating in the class. I loved learning. I loved the school. What was very complicated was that both our parents worked full-time and we had to wait at the doorstep or with one of the neighbours until our parents got home.

VASILKA:
And you head to high school …

MIRJANA:

Here, I finally met my lifelong friends who were all immigrant girls. I have to remind myself that our father insisted we go to an all-girls school, so that we could focus on education. He didn’t even let us work at Preston Market to get a bit of money. But we were also lucky. We had the best teachers. This was Preston Girls High School, a state and very poverty-stricken school, all working class, mostly migrants. The teachers were just out of college. They were so enthusiastic and ready to try new ways of learning and wanted us to shine. It wasn’t a status-oriented success, but it was a sense that you had capacity.

VASILKA:
What’s the next part of the journey after you finish up at high school.

MIRJANA:

And then, yes, the shock of starting architecture at Melbourne University.

VASILKA:

Tell me about that!

MIRJANA:

I was very naive. I had my own little world. I didn’t often link it or understand the bigger world that I was in. I had no concept of class, because I had just lived in my own little locality. I had never heard of private schools. I thought everyone was just like us, because we had a great education. I went to uni because there was the Whitlam window of free education. So important for so many of us that went to uni at that time. When I told the other students that I went to Preston Girls High School, they were all enamoured, because they thought, oh, we haven’t heard of that private school. Because it was an all-girls school, they assumed it was a private school. None of them had been to Preston – are you kidding? They were all from very secure, and I’d say, upper echelon society.
I loved learning about architecture and how important it is. Everyone thinks maybe it’s important because it organises the spaces we spend all our lives in. That’s a very important part of it, but it is also important because, as Robin Evans says, it kind of suspends our disbelief in the ideal. When you walk into a beautiful place such as a mosque, a hospital, or a room, it just raises your sense of existence in that existential sense. So, I loved it.

VASILKA:

I think this is a good moment where we venture into your book Migrant Housing – Architecture, Dwelling, Migration. It was first published in 2019. But this was a very long project for you. What I’m in awe of in terms of this book, is that you draw on so many disciplines. And there’s beautiful drawings that you do. It’s anthropological, sociological, and linguistic. It really is quite a mammoth project. But also, I think the expression and how you put it together, how you draw on psychoanalysis. It’s poetic, beautiful, and very tender. So, in terms of an academic book, I don’t know whether tender and academic go in the same sentence so often, but for me, that’s what it was. So, tell me tell me about this intellectual interest, this mission?

MIRJANA:

Before the book, there was a PhD, which I have to say, is a most significant exercise as it eventually opened the world for me. There was my first conference paper in Singapore on the migrant house. It got a good response. Eventually, that paper was published in a book. Out of that conference, we formed a group of scholars called Other Connections. And out of that group came four conferences and two books. The second book came out of a conference on migrancy and architecture. I did get a chapter in that book. I wrote about the village as well as the city. Things that I had read for the PhD, which was a lot of post-structuralist theory including psychoanalytic theory, became more and more, kind of real to me, in terms of my own development as a scholar, but that took a while.

VASILKA:

Obviously in this book, you’re documenting an architectural transformation of two sites, the village of Zavoj in the Republic of Macedonia, through the process of emigration, and the housing of Southern European migrants, from Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia, in Melbourne, through immigration. Your thinking has endured over 30 years and, as a longitudinal research project, I’m curious to know about what started you on this journey, Zavoj in Macedonia and the migrant house, as it appears in Melbourne?

MIRJANA:

I say in the acknowledgements, that after the completion of the architecture degree, and working as an architect, I had left home. So when I went back to visit my home, it reminded me every time I walked up that street, that all these houses had patterns and, by that time, I was probably astute in recognising patterns in the architecture. And I thought, what are these houses, and who built them? The house that my parents kind of altered completely from a little wooden bungalow into a brick veneer with these large terraces. I looked at those houses and thought we didn’t learn anything about them in my architecture degree, and so I started.

VASILKA:

Did that surprise you?

MIRJANA:

Well, no, but we have a more interdisciplinary, different historiography of architecture these days. It would surprise me now if I did not think about the influence of migration on the built environment. People use my book to teach with, not only in Australia, but also internationally, because the migration house story is relevant to many places, so I think what I’ve been doing is trying to give a kind of an architectural and historical account of our story as first generation, second generation, third generation immigrants. If you don’t have a history and a historical account, then you don’t have that foundation, which kind of not only legitimates you, but entitles you to speak, you know. I wanted to generate that foundation in terms of our housing. It has been done in other ways, but not in terms of the architecture. When my friends (from university) from private, middle-class Anglo families came to dinner, my parents loved them, and they loved my parents, but they would say, oh, God, there’s no trees in this suburb. Oh, goodness, where are the gardens? And, I would say, yes, there are gardens, and there are trees, they’re fruit trees. I didn’t think that then, because I was trying to assimilate, but the book gave me an opportunity to think through that. More recently, Alexander Kelly, one of the founders of a Sydney restaurant and cultural hub called Baba’s Place, interviewed me about the book. We were on a mocked-up stage in the restaurant, and it looked like a wedding photo shoot scene. There were white lace curtains and lace over the chairs. We laughed about it. There were over 150 young people of the current sort of 30-year-olds, millennials/Generation X. And we were talking about my book. They were glued. It was my five minutes of stardom. And then after the interview, they came up individually and just said that it validated them.

VASILKA:

And how powerful is that?

MIRJANA:

So powerful. And they loved it. The other thing is that I’ve been interviewed on that four-part series on, The Houses That Built Australia on the ABC, because of this book. I was also in the Palazzo di Cozzo, the Franco Cozzo documentary by Madeleine Martinello. This book was also reviewed in The Age along with the Walderton Photographic book that looks at the interiors of migrant houses. He’s an excellent photographer. Beautiful photographs, but it would be wonderful to have the research to accompany it.
The book also had six major reviews in academic architecture and interdisciplinary journals. It’s called ‘groundbreaking’, in terms of research in architecture. So, I was very taken aback by all of that. People come up to me constantly and say what an important book it has been for them.

MAPPING MIGRATION AND EMIGRATION

VASILKA:

I think what it captures is it legitimises the migrant experience. As you rightly point out, you know, through the discourse and through the discussion of the built environment, also, importantly through dwelling and home. Is there anything more fundamental? And yet so taken for granted on many levels, I think there’s a radical element here.

MIRJANA:

And it’s about things that we see but we don’t really interrogate or understand. Migrants shaping and making their environment. It’s about their agency and creativity and vision. And in fact, constructing their world so that they can be participants from within this society. It’s almost the antithesis of the whole homesickness nostalgia narrative that was so dominant. And migrants themselves too, though not deliberately, made the narrative of victims. You know, there was so much creative productivity in the making of these earlier postwar dwellings and homes, built in the 1960s and 1970s prior to the larger housing. And so, why shouldn’t they reference the old country? I mean, if you look at Melbourne and go to a bit of London, you will feel like you’re in the same place. Why shouldn’t they reference their architectural traditions?
I love psychoanalytic theory and I borrow from it to understand the built environment, so I had to tell both ends of the story, the trauma end and the creative, productive dimension. I had to go back to one of those places where people emigrated from to understand migration. What is the story of migration in terms of place and belonging and housing? While I was doing research in Macedonia and staying with my maternal grandmother in Ohrid, I thought, I must find a village. My grandmother suggested I stay in the village of Zavoj where we have relatives and so I can be there for a longer period. My relatives agreed I could stay with them for a month.
Zavoj is a mountain village, which I think was important. I was meticulous. I paced, measured and drew the entire village. Every little structure in it.

VASILKA:

Has the condition of the village changed?

MIRJANA:

Yes. As people depart, and as people return. There’s life, but then there’s also the desolation of people leaving. The people still living there were mostly the elderly. All the younger generations had left to get educated and some of them moved to those two naselbi/населби (suburbs) near Ohrid, but then quite a lot came to Australia. I made a map of where they had migrated to, the emigrants of Zavoj connect San Francisco, places in Sweden and Germany and Australia. I put the village at the centre of the world and then where people had gone from that village so that the village is no longer a traditional locality that is closed off from the world. After migration, the village is connected to the diaspora. And this is an important template for not just the village of Zavoj but for how we understand the process of migration, how we understand diasporic communities and how they come together.

MEDITERRANEAN TRACES

VASILKA:

I wanted to come back to The Migrant House. You spend a bit of time in the book talking about post-war migrant housing in Melbourne from 1955 to 1975. One of the sites, if you like, that you use is the ‘Northcote Enclave.’ Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

MIRJANA:

This was a very broad study of identifying patterns of the migrant house by documenting the houses in Northcote, Thornbury, Preston, Epping, and Thomastown. I did a very broad study, to illustrate that this isn’t just a tiny phenomenon. This is a pattern of our housing wherever there were migrants that came during that period. It’s different for migrants after that period. During this period the architecture of the housing was innovative, but after this period, in Australia, ideas of housing development and construction exploded into volume housing.
After that broad study, I needed a focus study of the interior of the dwelling and the people. There were two other projects. One was the Northcote Enclave and the other was a long-term project, which was all with Macedonian participants.
I knew about the Enclave because I lived near there and I also visited a friend who lived there and I would think, why are these houses so similar? The houses were nearly all the same.

VASILKA:

Right. And, when you say they were all the same, can we just talk that out a bit?

MIRJANA:

There’s several elements through which you can recognise migrant housing from that period. One is, the wire cut bricks. Not pressed bricks. Two is the colour of those bricks. Some were cream, but many were a kind of burnt orange. Three are the big terraces, what in the homestead-style house might be the veranda. The terraces are large, like outdoor rooms, and people in the first era of these houses, sit at the front, facing the street, having their coffee. There’s a social practice that connects the dwelling to the neighbourhood, saying hello to people as they walk past. Тhe terraces are important as are the large windows to let the sun in, to let light in.

A lot of migrants were shocked at ‘the horrible little dark houses’ that they first moved into when they arrived. They didn’t find them beautiful. They didn’t find them easy to live in. There was no light. In the new houses, the adaptations are important, like putting a big window at the front, making the veranda usable by putting in a trellis to grow a vine. There’s lots of little elements that immediately indicate this has been adapted or built by postwar southern migrants. There’s the entry, the ritual of arrival to the house. These culturally appropriate houses facilitated the dignity of the migrant. And the arrival is kind of monumental. This is their kind of compensation, their legacy of why they lost their own homeland, why they left. More than that, there’s clean geometry, it’s not this messy little lot of ornamental things. There is order and control. This is a world they have built; they have control over it, as producers and creators.

Some have clever gardens, they’re environmental and ecological, before those words became popular. Before they became vogue.
When I go and see my aunt, we always enter by the back door. If you are family, neighbour, friend, you go around the back. This is familiarity. But it’s also not too dirty the front part of the house because that’s where the reception areas are for gatherings, with large rooms to have many people over. There’s a practical element, but there’s also formality in these houses.
A student from Monash, did the most gorgeous set of drawings of his Nonna and Nonno’s Backyard. The drawings were seasonal, in terms of what that backyard got used for: why they grew certain things; what they did with them; what was being made, like pickles, or tomato sauce, or wine; and how and who did it. And it has given license to students to look, almost lovingly, at their grandparents’ house and backyard. I think what is also incredibly important in that dyadic relationship where connecting with your grandparents is connecting with the tradition. You are connecting here, in a diasporic community. It has given these students a way of engaging with architecture.

IS MIGRANT STILL MARGINAL?

VASILKA:

This brings me to my next question about whether migrant housing has penetrated the national consciousness. And in what ways? And has there been, you know what, an adaptation from the dominant culture?

MIRJANA:

It’s not just about migrants carving a space for themselves. It’s also about migrants taking their place as part of a diasporic story.

VASILKA:

That has legitimacy of place.

MIRJANA:

Well, interestingly, that enclave that I studied, around 10 years ago, was different. There were still some of the original people living there. Now none of the original people live there. And their houses were purchased by others, but each house has been maintained. None of them have demolished the house. The first thing they’ve changed is the front garden, because now native gardens are all in vogue. I wrote about how there is no such thing as a native garden because a native garden in a suburban environment is also a manufactured thing. Whether it’s native, or whether it’s cactus on white pebbles, it’s a manufactured thing, and when we say native garden, it doesn’t mean those trees once grew in this area.
Architects call me to ask me if you have any rules (about heritage) about what we should do or not do to this migrant house, you know, practicing architects, and so forth, and they’re on it. They love the big windows and the terraces. It’s about trying to articulate the socio-spatial field.
Everyone has renovated the back of their house so they can walk straight out into the garden. A lot of people sit at the front and have a coffee. So, there are those changes that have infiltrated into what was then a much more monocultural space.
It also extends beyond the house. When the Northcote Enclave was built, there was an espresso bar, a Pasticceria, a deli on High Street and the churches; people promenaded along High Street. So, the house generates an urban culture and a suburban way of living – you walk and you bump into people and so forth, and you might stop for a coffee.

VASILKA:

You have described that migrant housing has shaped and been supported by migrant belonging and the formation of neighbourhoods. And new cultural and transcultural societies which demand new concepts of both migration and architectural history. How has migrant housing penetrated the national consciousness?

MIRJANA:

Maybe some of it is unconscious. There’s now so many immigrants here that we all live in slightly similar, slightly varied ways. But, if you take the food, I think it’s underestimated how much contribution to a diverse society migrants have made and continue to make. One thing I didn’t mention is the relationship between language and the house. The migrant house became a kind of an enclave, where at least two languages were spoken, and then a mixture of those languages. So that house enabled the speaking and maintenance of these other languages. There was a kind of linguistic, architectural space constructed through the house. The house was very important. It facilitated a kind of diversity. Linguistically, as well as in practices in the backyard, what they made, cooked, the smells, the summer kitchen where all the fish was cooked, and all the smelly things were done, and things that made mess, where zelnik /зелник and maznik /мазник were rolled out.
And so there is a vocal dimension to the migrant house, which I haven’t discussed a lot here, but which the beautiful but late Sneja Gunew talked about.

VASILKA:

And I wanted to talk about Sneja Gunew, because I think it has such important connective points particularly with Kalliope X. You reference the marginalisation of migrant research. Gunew touches on how there’s been an issue of marginalisation, and a problem for poetic and fictional writers, she argued that non-Anglo migrant female writers produce innovative and complex networks between the speaking position and linguistic traditions and subject constructions. So, language for Gunew, as other migrant author writers, is a symptom and a site of trauma. I want to understand, what is this trauma that we’re talking about, and how do we make sense of it?

MIRJANA:

I think writing or art making is what might, in psychoanalytic theory, be called touching that site of trauma, or that thing of lack. Who am I? I don’t know. What am I doing? I don’t know. Why am I alive? I don’t know. So, it’s partly existential, but more than that, it’s symbolic. In psychoanalytic theory, Julia Kristeva talks about this as well. You have a mother tongue. All our languages are turned into mother tongues when we emigrate when we arrive in a society where that language is no longer the authorial language, therefore the linguistic trauma varies. English migrants are a very different kettle of fish to non-English migrants. English migrants tend to have a linguistic privilege within the migrant world, not always, of course, not the poor kids, and so forth, who have their own trauma, but it’s not necessarily the linguistic trauma of other migrants, although sometimes they get picked on for their pommy accents. The migrant trauma around language is related to structural change, when your language is no longer the symbolic language of authorial society. All human subjects tend towards the symbolic, otherwise they can’t actually participate in society, so that the writing has to oscillate between the kind of mother world, the mother tongue, and who you are in that world, and who you can become in this world, and it has to start, doing that symbolic work. Although, poetry is a different type of symbolic work. It’s not like academic research, that is explanatory. It’s more profound, more nuanced.
All good art is a kind of an oscillation, whether it’s writing or visual, oscillation between a kind of maternal state and the world, a set of laws and languages. In psychoanalytic theory, law is the law of becoming a subject. So, all artists must do that, but as a person who’s in a migrant family, that language is more traumatic in ways that are specific. If you’re the first person to learn English, you’re suddenly translating legal documents or medical situations, as a nine-year-old. So there’s layers of trauma around the language because language isn’t just words, you have different traditions. And when you read one of those women poets, as a migrant daughter, you resonate with all those words, and Sneja Gunew has enabled this.

A ‘ROOM’ OF HER OWN = THE MIGRANT DAUGHTER’S STUDY?

VASILKA:

We’ve talked about the migrant daughter. But the migrant daughter’s study, in terms of your own formation. Being away from the daily chaos. Chaos of the household. And that you had to find, you had to do something with that chaos, you had to express it. You mentioned that the Migrant Daughter Study is: Diasporic. Fragile. Inventive. What is this struggle?

MIRJANA:

During my upbringing while living there with my parents, I needed a separate space to get away from the drama. And so, my study was at the furthest bit of the house plot/block. It was right at the end after the house proper, then after the garage, which was my father’s workshop, and then after my mother’s sewing room, and then my study, and the summer kitchen was over there too. I wrote about the creative production, that the house, the migrant house, is a creative House. My study was a statement that this is important to me, to the rest of the household, and they weren’t to disturb me. It was, at the time, a separation, a deliberate separation from the drama. I am not you. I have to say that in writing this book, I also began to understand what the house had offered as a platform for me, and I suppose also what my parents had offered as a platform for me. That platform also gave me the kind of body of knowledge and tradition and language and customs and practices where I didn’t have to assimilate in a complete or absolute way. I just needed the skills to navigate that world but also, you know, start from an authorial position as an academic and as an architect, as a writer, to tell that story.

VASILKA:

Thank you for speaking with Kalliope X on migration and housing, your book Migrant Housing – Architecture Dwelling Migration, and your contribution to the discourse and impact of migration and the built environment.

Images
All images are from Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration (2019) by Mirjana Lozanovska. Routledge