Jack Halberstam & Benoit Loiseau: Anarchitecture

About this event

Jack Halberstam Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto in conversation with Benoît Loiseau (The Death of the Clinic) We are excited to celebrate the publication of Jack Halbertam’s new book Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto on Thursday September 24th. Even more so that Benoît Loiseau, author of the new The Death of the Clinic, will be joining the conversation. “A must read. Understanding trans bodies as ‘unarchitectural’ projects and architecture as a task for building social and political norms, Halberstam has written a new theory of the body as much as a manifesto for unbuilding architecture.” —Paul B. Preciado, author of Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time. Anarchitecture describes the aesthetic practice of splitting and cutting, dismantling and undoing, unmaking, unbuilding, and ultimately unworlding. The trans body splits bodily coherence, dismantles the gender binary, and unbuilds bodily meaning. In these chapters, Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, along with Alvin Baltrop’s 1970s images of collapsing warehouses and Beverly Buchanan’s post-demolition fragmentary sculptures, return with a vengeance through the contemporary aesthetic gestures of Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, boychild, and Every Ocean Hughes. Anarchitecture unmakes space and offers a new rhetoric for emptiness. In its conclusion, the book explores this rhetoric through Renee Gladman’s anarchitectural experiments with language. By reading anarchitecture through transness and…

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