The space of resistance is not simply the underside of the space of domination.

A camouflaged presence is not an absent presence.

October 2022, Langstrasse 111.

The three-week long exhibition in Sexkino Roland, curated by Querformat and Nexpo marks a starting point of an ongoing transformation of the building from a site for cis-male heterosexuality into a community centre for queer people of colour, through interventions of unbuilding, mutating and fabulating.

Unbuilding: cut, dismantle, tear apart the building. Disrupt the architectural representation, amplify its visibility and subvert its constructed temporality.

Fabulating: pick up historical queer spaces and reproduce them in a fictional way. Preserving queer memories from a different generation while inventing its contemporary meaning.

Mutating: misuse, design as if architecture elements are body parts. Pushing against the imposed use of thingss, blurring the boundary between body and architecture.

queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities outside the schedule of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death. This queer time requires and produces new conceptions of space. It depends on an understanding the narrative of a way of life in relation to the community.

Reflected by the generational difference marked by the AIDS pandemic, it seems that each body possesses their own temporality while still being able to engage a dynamic interaction or entanglement.

In a space of queer people with multiple temporalities, wanting to claim space and to retreat ask for a complex spatial visibility.

Master thesis Project Shen He supervised by:

Prof. Tom Emerson, Amy Perkins, Sonja Flury, Boris Gusic

Adam Nathaniel Furman

And in conversation with Querformat and many queer friends.