Architecture Wants Us to be Cis?

Further Analysis on Maike Hemmers:
Making Anarchitecture Palpable

“They — we — have turned away from figuration or indexical or mimetic representation and towards the abstract, the symptomatic, even the architectural. What might the abstract and architectural offer in terms of transgender representation?” (Jack Halberstam, Unbuilding Gender)

Artist Maike Hemmers (1987, Germany) exhibited her work, the Deep Becomes Palpable (6 May 2022 — Sunday 24 September 2023) in 84 Steps by Kunsinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. The curatorial project enabled the gallery to be an interactive mobile space. Hemmers’ work was one that asks for sensory engagement whether it’s seeing, smelling, touching, etc. The project advances the idea of soft and queer resistance. This is supported by the space’s attributes such as pastel drawings and soft sculptures. The assemblage that includes the paintings resembles walls that demarcate the space from the “outside”. She collaborated with textile designer Karen Huang in creating pillow-like structures where we can relate our body to, laying on it or laid on us. The material is infused with multiple scents from cherry pits to cedar bark. Overall, Hemmers explains that her work explores material relations, in her words, driven by “feminist architecture, soft resistance, and queer directions”.  

The work addressed issues regarding embedded gender values that are imposed through architectural qualities. How often does architecture pass our consciousness as a neutral medium, one that we take as a given? I contemplate in this paper the connection between cis-identity formation and architecture. Here, I ask; to what extent does architecture provide coordinates of becoming cis as implied through This Deep Becomes Palpable?

I engage with literary works from Jack Halberstam, Marquis Bey, and Lucas Crawford that elaborate on the intersectionality of transgender and architecture. I use a specific concept namely the anarchitecture as a mode of dismantling vernacular cis-architecture. This concept is advanced by Halberstam as a mode of unbuilding that is inspired by the 1970’s New York City collective the Anarchitecture mostly credited to Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), who explored the power relation to architecture. I illuminate that architecture can be seen as a reflection of human corporeality and how I view Hemmers’ project as a continued legacy of the anarchitecture as a concept. As will be discussed in the following, I argue in this paper that architecture is a physical manifestation or reflection of the dominant body, which is the heteronormative and their supplementary ways of being.

More a Verb, Less a Noun

The referring of the term, trans* speaks to the possibilities beyond the organization of naming in gender variances that Halberstam introduces in Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (4). I use this term as a reflection of the anarchitectural cause that is uncontainable by (gender) structures. To Halberstam, a trans* embodiment goes beyond the framing as a journey because it assumes a destination in which the trans* bodies are constantly building and unbuilding (“Unbuilding Gender”). Opposed to its status as a site within an exhibition, it unframes itself from being merely a spatial site because then it would require such a destination, one that is governed by gender binaries. The very structure of the white-box gallery is dismantled the moment Hemmers places her project the Deep Becomes Palpable. 

Crawford expands that texture is something that is "an activity, not a state of being, " which is central to the Deep Becomes Palpable where this sensation is projected, Crawford states: “Texture cannot be fixed. Like gender in its relationality, texture is palpable only in becoming. We don’t know what texture “is,” only what texture does." (“the Crumple and the Scrape”) The softness of Hemmer’s textile-based material shows active resistance towards this notion of hegemonic architecture or rather can we say vernacular cis-architecture? The relation between forming cisness and architecture becomes a nearly impossible labyrinth in determining if architecture forms cisness or cisness forms architecture. Can both orders exist simultaneously? As we have come to this entanglement I observe Hemmers’ project to coalesce multiple desires such as the queer, trans* and feminist in dismantling patriarchy that is perpetually reinforced by architecture. Hemmers facilitates such a room where the body can constantly move and the mind can wander. Texture is one of the many dimensions that is made “palpable” in the work, but its tangibility does not fix an answer, but rather relations. I take here the texture that Hemmers “gathered” provided possibilities or perhaps mutations of what it can be/feel like. 

The process that trans* bodies go through is core to the anarchitecture (non) structure, or a mode to destructurize, in which Halberstam expresses in “Unbuilding Gender”:

“This is a body that has been made and unmade, undone, frayed, opened up and then closed — imperfectly, and in ways that challenge many more binaries beyond male versus female. The trans* body as presently imagined confronts rather than confirms common assumptions about the coherent and incoherent, material and immaterial, internal and external.”

Halberstam also asserted Aubre Lorde’s case: 

“Lorde declares: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” (qtd in “Unbuilding Gender”) 

This is where the concept of anarchitecture becomes significant, for it undoes the master’s house without using the very tools that are constructed by the masters. To put it simply, a radical architecture undoing can be done in an anarchitectural manner. In terms of ways of being and becoming Halberstam presses: “if patriarchal systems of domination are understood as architectural, then queer/trans*/feminist activist responses can be received as anarchitectural.” (“Unbuilding Gender”) 

According to Halberstam, the difficulty in visualizing the trans* bodies is within the architecture’s constraints (“Unbuilding Gender”).  When architecture attempts to “make” such acts of inclusion or representations they merely mirror the wrong and the right, which is still based on the coordinates of the cis-body in terms of gender variants. Therefore works like Hemmers’ asks for reconsideration and awareness of architecture whose cis-projected value is not accidental. To add, in Trans* Halberstam talks about how trans* bodies exist in fragments and unfinished therefore contradictory to the architectural aim. The relational and collaborative attribute in Hemmers’ work reflects what Halberstam specifies as the “constantly under construction” (“Unbuilding Gender”). 

Dismantling the master’s house

If we take Hemmer’s work as a site of anarchitecture that means it aspires to undo its site-ness, its fixing of a certain spatial coordinate. In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, Bey advances Halberstam’s observation in which they state:

“And this, Halberstam says, departs from the masculinist tendencies of modernist architecture and brutalist styles of a will to instantiate power—phallic erections and whatnot (which is not the same as the mere likeness or possession of a penis)—toward not a “feminine” destination but, indeed, revelatory in the project of dismantling and remaking.” 

Bey's arguments further reinforce the dismantling of the master's house, the dominant values as also implied by Lorde: 

"If we have the body as house, as architecture, the process of anarchitecture does not care much for making things work inside the existing framework, brushing off dust there and tightening a screw here; it is excited about tearing the parameters apart." (3)

The aforementioned trans* embodiment exists in a way that explores the deterioration of such structures. Bey emphasizes, architecture is interwoven with the desire for housedness. (4) I take from Bey that architecture didactically imposes a desire of becoming, that simultaneously forms a being. Becoming and being a house. What Bey yearns for, which they express: "I needed more room than the architecture of the house could provide," is welcomed by Hemmers. The Deep Becomes Palpable imagines this capacious quality. Bey further interrogates the issue with gender nonconformity where one is always placed within a spectrum (10). The vernacular language and structure conveniently taxonomize and divide into binaries. This ties in with how in architecture, the relation to space is always regulated, through a language of many; such as the language of sitting down, language of where to place one’s bag, and so on. In The Deep Becomes Palpable, one is unchained from such regulations. If we think of the juxtaposed modernist Rotterdam architecture to be deliberate in Hemmer’s work then it speaks about what Halberstam and Bey acknowledge as hegemonic binaries imposed by the architecture. I deduct from Bey’s argument that architecture is a metaphor for human corporeality. (3) If so, the body is the house then anarchitecture aims to dismantle the structures; its ceilings, its walls, its foundation (3).

To summarize, the Deep Becomes Palpable also as an ephemeral project proves that architecture always seems to have a singular, universal outcome, that one, the fear of material impermanence is instilled upon indestructible material that makes buildings more difficult to deteriorate. Secondly, a temporal building is suitable for the changing of producers and users. I argue what it crystalizes, is the enabling that space is provided not to emphasise instability but stable possibility. Hemmers’ work is anarchitecture for it participates in an active process where firstly can be felt from the texture and the following bodily relation which allows the multiplicity of bodily interpretations. It captures what Crawford says precisely about texture as activity, “to be” rather than “is”, it reflects the imagination beyond just moving to a space and another, it recognizes the transitory, the liminal, and the incessant contradiction. The non-siteness of Hemmers project supports what we have discussed about what architecture lacks, the ability to transform, unmake and most importantly to Halberstam, unfinished. The Deep Becomes Palpable provides the capaciousness to interpret bodily relation to a space that does not attempt to fix gender normativity. In the end, the “an” in anarchitecture stands for the refusal to fit itself within the architectural category and will remain under construction.

Bibliography

“About : Maikehemmers.” Maikehemmers.com, 2024, www.maikehemmers.com/index.php?/about/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

Bey, Marquis. “Back in the Day.” Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, Duke University Press, 2022.

Crawford, Lucas. “The crumple and the scrape.” Places Journal, no. 2020, 5 Mar. 2020, https://doi.org/10.22269/200305.

Crawford, Lucas. Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space. Routledge, 2020.

Halberstam, Jack. “Body Unbuilding: On Cuts, Stitching and Anarchitecture - Architectural Review.” Architectural Review, 18 Mar. 2019, www.architectural-review.com/essays/body-unbuilding-on-cuts-stitching-and-anarchitecture. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. University of California Press, 2018. 

Halberstam, Jack. “Unbuilding Gender.” Places, no. 2018, Oct. 2018, https://doi.org/10.22269/181003. Accessed 21 Apr. 2024.

“Maike Hemmers: This Deep Becomes Palpable - Experience - Kunstinstituut Melly.” Kunstinstituutmelly.nl, 2022, www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/en/experience/1404-maike-hemmers-this-deep-becomes-palpable. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.