Antigua Black. Portrait of an island people
Bryant Mclaughlin Van-Low
Supervisor
Abstract
Choreographies of Social Infrastructures
This research explores the relationship between labour, migration, and social infrastructure in postcolonial urban contexts. It positions social infrastructure as a critical spatial lens through which the socio-political and economic conditions of place are organised and experienced. While labour and migration are typically framed as the primary drivers of urbanisation and development, this project argues that the infrastructures sustaining collective and everyday life are equally political formations.
Cultural, community, commercial, coastal, and leisure spaces function as spatial systems where power, regulation, desire, and negotiation are enacted. Within these environments, work, governance, belonging, and mobility are materially structured and socially reproduced. Labour functions not only as economic subsistence but as a mechanism through which dependency and hierarchy are maintained. Migration emerges both as a response to these conditions and as a structuring force generating transnational circuits of work, culture, and informal exchange. These dynamics intersect within social infrastructures, where labour systems and mobility patterns are embedded, contested, and reconfigured.
Rather than existing outside productive economies, social infrastructures operate in dialectical relation to labour regimes, state regulation, and market logics. By observing these entanglements, the research foregrounds dimensions of agency, intimacy, and social imagination often marginalised within political economy centred urban and migration studies.
The selected sites are approached in an archipelagic manner, comparatively situated within a historically interconnected Caribbean and circum-Caribbean landscape shaped by colonial labour regimes, regional mobility, and overlapping economic circuits. This framework enables the analysis of shared structural conditions while accounting for distinct spatial, social, and economic outcomes.
Bio
Bryant Mclaughlin Van-Low is an artist and researcher based between London, UK, and Trinidad and Tobago, working across visual art, spatial research, and cultural programming. Mclaughlin Van-Low holds a BA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in City Design from the Royal College of Art, London. His postgraduate research explored the relationship between architecture, borders, and migration, developing through a collaborative project with Pune-based architect Ashish Dallal. He is currently a PhD candidate in Architecture (Research) at the Royal College of Art, School of Architecture, supported by the Sir Frank Bowling PhD Studentship. His doctoral research explores the relationships between labour, migration, and social infrastructure.
His art practice has been presented in London and internationally, including Layered Textures at Dada Gallery (2022), curated by Oyinkansola Dada; Social Tapestry at Chilli Art Projects (2023), curated by Aubury Huggins; and Telepathy and the Unseen at The Tagli (2025), where he was invited by Dimitrios Tsivrikos and Bella Blake. In 2024, his work was presented at Base Milano during Milan Design Week through the Royal College of Art's MA City Design programme. He has also exhibited through RCA BLK and Royal College of Art Special Collections, including Sankofa (2023) and Poetics of Becoming (2025), invited by Emily Moore and Julita Mahrer Viñas respectively. Across these contexts, his practice moves between art, architecture and curation.
Alongside his artistic practice, Mclaughlin Van-Low develops curatorial and public programming through Sankofa Projects, producing conversations and exchanges between artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners. The programme has included conversations with Young Space (John Reno Jackson, 2025), Shalya Marshall (2025), and Studio Chapple (Louie Chapple and Lisa Marie Harris, 2026). The programming has been funded and supported by the Royal College of Art, RCA BLK, as well as through independent initiatives.
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Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme