Project by Nadeysh Ojasmar

Dabuyaba is an architectural project that treats history as choreography and architecture as a performative instrument for ritual, memory, and repair. The work emerges from a year-long investigation that began by restaging Princess Margaret’s 1958 visit to Belize as a Wanaragua performance, using drawing and promptbooks to invert colonial pageantry and recenter Garífuna cultural practice. Through the study of Wanaragua as a living archive, the project understands dance, costume, and procession as spatial tools that temporarily construct architectures of resistance, mockery, and survival. Building on this foundation, the project turns to the Dabuyaba, a Garífuna ceremonial structure whose construction and use are themselves ritualized acts involving the entire community, and whose purpose is to heal, remember, and reorder relationships between the living and the ancestral past. The proposal transforms Belize City’s Government House, now the House of Culture, from a preserved monument of empire into a quarry of colonial matter. Rather than demolishing or erasing the building, every column, beam, door, and floorboard is catalogued, detached, and reassembled through a process modeled on Dabuyaba construction. The existing foundations and structural grid are reused to form a new Dabuyaba, where chants, drums, hammocks, and collective gathering charge the space with new meaning. Materials salvaged from the house extend outward along Princess Margaret Drive to create stages, workshops, and community spaces for Wanaragua performance, rehearsal, and teaching, recasting a route of royal procession as an infrastructure for Garífuna ritual life. Guided by the Wanaragua mask, mesh becomes perforated wall panels, ribbons become networks of hammocks, and shells are transformed into instruments that amplify sound rather than ornament. Dabuyaba ultimately proposes a different script for colonial architecture, one in which buildings learn new choreographies, power circulates rather than concentrates, and architecture performs as a living, communal practice of remembrance and decolonization.