A Queer Queery

A Queer Query

Organized by David Eskenazi

• An event on queerness around architecture today.

Watch live: https://livestream.com/sciarc/...

Queer culture reflects a deep love for uplifting the marginalized, for standing up for visibility, and for making its own space. It’s inclusive and particular, genre-defying, painful yet hopeful. The term “queer” is a reclaimed word, transformed from an insult to badge of honor, a word that has metamorphosized and grown to broadly encapsulate a group of people who feel an identity with queerness’s accumulation of gender, sexuality, class, race, and bodily histories, and the politics of life that flow from identities that are more complex, more vague, more outside, than things that aren’t queer. Every examination of queer people, of queer culture, is also an examination of how dominant systems subjugate all people.

That’s what makes talking about queerness so tricky: the term is hard to pin down and it’s hard to make claims about its entirety. Can queer art, queer culture, and queer people construct independent discourses? And can architecture’s entanglements in commerce ever allow it to queer, albeit briefly?

Watch while isolating at home: A Queer Query is a day-long performance, presentation, and discussion event that invites you to tune in, keep the video feed open, and take it in. Architects, artists, theorists, and critics examine the urban and the rural, digital privacy and gathering spaces, the art object and the building, and the avatar and the body. Eschewing definitive positions, A Queer Query invites questions and pauses on uncertainty. Reports from the city comingle with performances that imagine other worlds, while films that examine the layers beneath sexual surveillance apps complement live lectures that cast architects as material scavengers.

With Aaron Betsky, Adrian Silva, Andrés Jaque, Andrew Holder, b.gosse, Enrique Agudo, Jack Halberstam, Jaffer Kolb, Jerome Haferd, Laida Aguirre, Leah Wulfman, Mimi Zeiger, Nancy Nguyen, Patrick Staff, Richard Mapes, Riley Hooker, V. Mitch McEwen, and Victor Jones.