EPHEMERAL ARCHITECTURE SERIES

EPHEMERAL ARCHITECTURE SERIES

This exhibition is led by a series of seemingly unanswerable questions, or-at least-shaky questions: what is queer space? Where is it? Who finds it? If queer space lacks permanence, how might we seek out a definition? In the built environment, in design, in history and theory, in quotidian moments and movements for the queer-identifying individual, how does one create a queer space? How does one maintain it? Who generates it and who experiences it? Who confirms its momentary or permanent reality? The Keller Gallery is the stage upon which we seek to productively embrace this precarity. It swings like a pendulum, unstable and provisional. It blossoms and decays it comes and goes, ceasing and halting. All of these particular spaces of seeming nothingness, exclusively defined and made sense of by the lexicons we use to name them, hold the potential for use as queer spaces. A metropolitan gymnasium or a farmer’s field, a bedroom or a basement, a street or a bathroom, a beach or a swimming pool, an alley or a highway. Tracing Queerness seeks to enact, to perform, to create a queer space through interventions made by an individual or community at large. Space has no natural character, no inherent meaning… As Michel de Certeau has argued, it is always invested with meaning by its users as well as its creators, and even when its creators have the power to define its official and dominant meaning, its users are usually able to develop tactics that allow them to use the space in alternative, even oppositional ways that confound the designs of its creators.

There are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use. The cultural historian George Chauncey notes, there simply “is no queer space ” actually: We begin with a question: how might an exhibition not only present or understand a community, but actively engage and parallel the practices of that community? As a spatial practice, a theorization, an identity, and a cultural orientation, ‘queerness’ works within and towards a negotiation between body, community, and space. In resistance to more traditional paradigms of exhibition that are built, presented, and discarded, Tracing Queerness embraces and embodies uncertainty and transience. Tracing Queerness also invites visitors to contribute something as kin and become part of an expansive and ephemeral set of relations – neither entirely digital nor physical – in order to be transformed by the spaces they have shaped and reimagined.

This exhibit proposes an alternate mode of assembling a community-driven queer space to ask: how do queer spatial practices simultaneously orient the queer community and dis-orient familiar ways of knowing self, space, and time? The curators offer a glimpse into this ongoing, contingent process of tracing the worlds we inherit and disinherit through contributions from a vast and growing community of artists, scholars, party-goers, activists, historians, and architects, among others, building up an inclusive and expanded notion of citation that bridges between the social, the spatial, and the academic. Jih (Lecturer, Architecture + Urbanism), is on view at MIT’s Keller Gallery through October 7, 2022. MIT Keller Gallery, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 7-408, Cambridge, MAĬambridge, MA, Septem– MIT announced that Tracing Queerness: Archiving the Ephemeral, an exhibition by Aidan Flynn (Teaching Fellow) and J. MIT Exhibit Tracing Queerness: Archiving the Ephemeral

Ephemeral architecture