Joséphine Baker across the Colonial Modern

On renowned night-club performer and Allied spy Joséphine Baker’s movements during the Second World War, told through essays, archival material, and photography.

In this unique study, architect and theorist Ines Weizman presents a speculative architectural travelogue of renowned night-club performer and Resistance spy Joséphine Baker’s movements during the Second World War. Based on Weizman’s installation at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the book uncovers political histories of colonization and occupation through the lens of architecture. 

Shortly after Germany occupied France, Baker—who had, up until the war, been performing in Paris and internationally—enlisted in the counterintelligence wing of the Free French Army. In 1940, she left Paris for Marseille, from which she departed in 1941 to establish networks and find allies in North Africa. In 1943, she began performing across the Middle East, traveling alongside, in advance of, or behind Allied soldiers, alternately conducting acts of espionage and entertainment. 

Her perilous trajectory across the shifting borders of North Africa and the Middle East is known only in broad terms, as evidence that could detail the series of places in which she performed is almost completely lost. Only a few faint traces, speculations, rumors, and documents indicate Baker’s presence in military camps, clubs, cabarets, casinos, theatres, and "gin joints" across the region. 

Centering around a seemingly minor architectural detail (a faded photograph of the remnants of a French flag painted on an interior wall of a long-since demolished casino in Haifa), this book searches for material clues of Baker’s movements to trace the political, racial, and religious conflicts encountered along her journey.

Featuring a film essay and a longer text discussing archival material, including photographs, documents, and correspondences, the book aims to untangle a web of cross-border relations that have since become hardened by national boundaries, and of trajectories now severed.

Ines Weizman is an architectural historian and theorist. She teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and is a Professor of Architectural Theory and Design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She also directs the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), an interdisciplinary research collective of architectural historians, filmmakers, and digital technologists. Her books include Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence and Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, co-authored with Eyal Weizman, Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years, and Documentary Architecture: Dissidence through Architecture.