Body of Mere Being

A multidisciplinary artistic research project that interrogates the place of queer embodiment within the gendered construction of public and private spaces. Starting from an assumption of a male- and heteronormative-dominated design and architecture of our built environment, the aim of the project is to expose the power dynamics between bodily boundaries and physical (as well as social) structures through a queer-feminist lens.

Here, the ‘embodiment’ of queerness represents a disruption in heteropatriarchal systems as a means to dismantle the logics of oppression and to move towards other ways of being beyond the gender and sexual binary, capitalism and neoliberalism. This disruption, or glitch, juxtaposes corporeal (in)visibility against the physical structures, architecture and design of the domestic and urban spaces to reveal their inter- and counteractions. At the same time, the complexities of embodiment are explored by breaking through the confines of what counts as a body in order to destabilize the dualistic delineations of normativity.

Scholarly references for the theoretical foundation of the project include Jane Randell (with Barbara Penner and Iain Borden), Gender, Space, Architecture: an Interdisciplinary Introduction, 1999; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961; Petra Doan, Queerying planning: Challenging heteronormative assumptions and reframing planning practices, 2016; Renate Lorenz, Queer Art: A Freak Theory, 2012; Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, 2020; and many more.

My Very Flesh Shall Resist Every Stone

2021, Analog photography

In this work, I evoke the relationship between corporeal boundaries and the built environment, in order to interrogate the place of queer bodies in urban spaces. I use my body in a nearly sculptural way to underline the lines, spaces, and constraints of my surroundings, while my uneasy posture emphasizes the tension between the individual and the ideological and social forces that shape urban reality. Anti- and pro-queer slogans are scrawled on my body, in a similar fashion to the surrounding graffiti, accentuating that queer bodies are not only sites of physical and social struggle, but also of lived experience and discursive realities.

Installation View, MuseumsQuartier Wien, 2023

This is My Fortress, Where I Contain My Fears

Video installation & public intervention, HD video, split screen, monochrome, sound, 16:9, 5’28”, 2022

In this work, performed and filmed at the Salzburg Fortress in Austria, during opening hours, I capture my gestures and movements within a structure originally intended for military defense and offense. I juxtapose the original robustness of the ancient fortress with its current fragility, mirrored against my own body, while claiming the stronghold as a space to contain my fears and anxieties about my queerness and safety.

Installation View, Open Studio Days, International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg, 2022

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Queer as a Daffodil