Vorlesung: Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark

Ringvorlesung im Rahmen der Ausstellung „Martha Rosler & Hito Steyerl. War Games“

Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York

In Kooperation mit Gender Studies, Urban Studies

Moderation: Dominique Grisard

In this present talk, I look towards anarchitectural practices of unmaking as promulgated by the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) and I link the ideas of unbuilding and creative destruction that characterize his work to develop a queer concept of anarchitecture focused upon the transbody . The concept of “anarchitecture” is attributed mainly to Matta-Clark, whose inventive site-specific cuts into abandoned buildings demonstrated an approach to the concept of home and to the market system of real estate that was anarchistic, creatively destructive, and full of queer promise. Of course, this is not to say that Matta-Clark nor any of the participants in the Anarchitecture group that he helped to found in downtown Manhattan in 1973 and ’74 would have understood their work in this sense. Rather, we might take up the challenge offered by Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural projects, in order to spin contemporary conversations about queer and trans* politics away from notions of respectability and inclusion and towards an anti-political orientation to unmaking a world within which queers and trans people, homeless people and immigrants are cast as problems for the neoliberal state.

Halberstam is currently working on a book titled WILD THING on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal