Five people were killed and another 25 were injured in a shooting last Saturday (the eve of the Transgender Day of Remembrance) when a gunman opened fire in an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs. The attack came amid growing fears of violence and intimidation toward the LGBTQ+ community.
The current anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, fuelled in America by Republicans that seem at the moment intent on targeting drag performers (Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson filed in November a bill to prohibit drag entertainers from performing on public property or at private functions where their performance may be viewed by a minor) is preventing the creation of safe environments where people can celebrate community and feel comfortable being who they are.
The creation of safe spaces and architectures is explored in the exhibition "Coming into Community", currently on at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in, Oslo, Norway. The event is part of the celebration for the Queer Culture Year, and marks the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of male homosexuality in Norway. Section 213 of the Norwegian Penal Code, which prohibited sexual acts between men, was indeed repealed on 21 April 1972.
The event, a joint effort organized by the National Museum, National Library and National Norwegian Archive for Queer History, explores architecture through the queer gaze and invites visitors to consider in which ways architecture can create new forms of community where there is space for everyone.
The first section of the event, hosted in the Ulltveit-Moe Pavilion, consists in a playful installation from the Swedish art and architecture collective MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier and Thérèse Kristiansson).
"Heaven by MYCKET" is based on the collective's years of research into queer spaces and queer club concepts with the power of creating more inclusive worlds.
In the installation the queer nightclub becomes the locus where the concept of community can be developed.
Visitors are free to dress up, dance, play and rest following a path with a walk-through closet where they can pick clothes and transform themlseves; a dance floor where they never have to dance alone, a bar where all kinds of bodies are welcome, and a canopy bed for solidarity and recovery.
This space is therefore an exploration and celebration of the nightclub, conceived as a form of architecture and as a way of getting together.
At the same time, the queer nightclub is almost an excuse, a starting point to examine wider questions about how spaces can help make people feel safe, dream and act.
Through this space MYCKET also points out the dichotomy between permanent and temporary architectures: nightclubs often have a short life, but, in the case of queer communities, they also end up having great significance.
The second part of the exhibition, on display in the Bucher Room, is more technical as it looks at urban planning from the past 70 years in Norway and analyses it from marginalized perspectives and in particular from the queer and feminist points of view.
Post-war housing construction in Norway focused on accommodating and nurturing the nuclear family. The "neighbourhood unit" became an important planning model in these years: designed to offer residents a sense of belonging, the unit served as the model for the Oslo suburb of Lambertseter.
The housing associations founded in these years, such as the Norwegian State Housing Bank, mainly focused on offering accommodation for nuclear families, something that penalised residents who did not fit this norm – for example, single people (until 1959, people who lived alone were excluded from social housing in Oslo), couples without children, students, older people or people with reduced mobility.
Yet things changed throughout the 1960s and '70s: between 1962 and 1965, four high-rise and two low-rise blocks were built in the Enerhaugen housing cooperative in central Oslo and, for the first time, single people could apply to the city's housing association for an apartment.
The housing market, though, kept on discriminating queer people: until 1967, two people could live together in an OBOS (the largest housing developer in Norway) home only if they were married. In 1981, however, anti-gay discrimination in the housing market became a crime.
In some cases, residents and residents' groups collaborated with architects to express the needs of their communities. The 1967 the Selegrend Movement was started by the Bergen-based lawyer and priest Edvard Vogt as a reaction to post-war housing construction.
The central focus of a Selegrend (literally a "happy community"), was no longer the nuclear family, but the idea of a country village with room for everyone, including housing-vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities, single parents, and immigrants. In 1970, the Selegrend Movement began collaborating with the architecture firm Cubus. In 1975, the first of two Selegrend projects were completed.
In the 1980s and '90s, Enerhaugen became a popular place to live among the gay and lesbian community. Originally designed to suit single people and childless couples, the smaller apartments located close to the city centre also appealed to many of those embracing queer lifestyles.
One intriguing project in this section refers to the Svartlamon neighbourhood in Trondheim: in the mid-1980s young people in the music and counterculture scenes in Trondheim began moving into a dilapidated area scheduled for redevelopment. Many of them were influenced by punk anti-capitalist ideologies and the squatting movement. As the years passed, squatters became tenants. Svartlamon is now an autonomous eco-community, a cooperative made up of 100 old and new buildings and nearly 300 residents. Rent is kept low through simple housing standards and collaborative DIY initiatives.
Apart from Norwegian projects, the exhibition includes also international perspectives. The American experience is analysed through the idea of a separatist gay state conceived by American activist Don Jackson, who was inspired by the Stonewall Riots in 1969.
Jackson proposed creating what he called the Stonewall Nation in Alpine County, California, a separate city for gay men, a safe place filled with love, where people could be themselves without the risk of encountering harassment, violence, and prejudice.
Don Jackson's utopian vision is the starting point for the film "The Stonewall Nation" (2014) by Sille Storihle, also included in the exhibition alongside a 1986 interview with Don Jackson conducted by Olaf Odegaard, artwork by Odegaard, and archive materials from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California.
Two other displays feature the work of Matrix, a feminist architecture collective that in the 1980s offered free architecture services to marginalized groups; and work by the lesbian architect, photographer and filmmaker Phyllis Birkby, who campaigned to raise awareness of women's needs in architecture and against the perpetuation of patriarchal attitudes by educational institutions.
In 1981, the feminist architectural cooperative Matrix was established in London. Matrix offered free architectural assistance to marginalized groups and co-designed with them. They worked with women's centres, kindergartens, and housing projects for single, gay and lesbian people. They also developed educational resources and methods to demystify the language and processes of architecture. Reduced state funding for community services led the group to disband in 1993, although many of the members continued their work through teaching and design.
As a lesbian woman, the American architect and filmmaker Noel Phyllis Birkby (1932-1994) had difficulty adjusting to the male-dominated field of architecture, and also to the heterosexual feminist movement. In the 1970s, Birkby began to organize "Environmental Fantasy Workshops" for women's groups throughout the United States. She was interested in what housing and living could look like if freed from patriarchal ideals. Inspired by the consciousness-raising techniques of 1970s activists, Birkby's discussion and drawing exercises were intended to make women more aware of their own desires and dreams.
Rather than definite solutions "Coming Into Community" poses questions about architecture, urban planning and community and about how architecture can help nurture interpersonal relations. All the dichotomies explored in the event - inclusion and exclusion, liminality/marginalization and integration - aim at showing that architecture and design can support differences and create a more tolerant world where there is room for everyone.
"Coming Into Community" runs until 29 January 2023. The exhibition will then be archived in a 3D digital format to allow people from all over the world to explore the themes examined in the event and help architects and designers to come up with innovative projects that can foster a stronger sense of community.
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