Open-cut

About

During a recent interview with AQNB, Queer Temporalities, Jack Halberstam reminds us that the pandemic has strengthened conditions of confinement and that architecture fully emerges as a space of domestic imprisonment. This is evidenced by increased domestic abuse and an unwillingness to be locked down in our homes. The intensity of the past two years has accelerated structural injustice through the biopolitical. Halberstam makes sense of the events of the past two years suggesting that ‘under conditions of the pandemic, inequalities under biopower have been highlighted.’ Race, class, and privilege that revolve around embodiment have unfolded to reveal a fundamental mistrust in the human. Open Cut invites us to unpack the complex set of signs and signals that the body inscribes upon its surface and its interiors. It also works architecturally, recognising the spatial relationship that is fundamental to the bodily conditions of crisis. This Open Cut reaches back and spans towards the future where articulations around the body will continue to hold cultural and aesthetic significance. This Open Cut is but a juncture in that journey, a pit stop along the length of bodily entanglements that continues to stretch on. The Gallery space will be opened up in this sense, the rooms, nooks, and columns standing in as a host, as a body. The stairwell submerges into a basement referring to the interior, fleshy articulation of the corporeal.