Link to download the DRAG(UE)_timeline

The DRAG(U.E.) teaching unit proposes to explore the (socially and physically) built environment through its performativity (Butler, 1990) by introducing the perspectives offered by gender studies, queer theories, de/postcolonial studies and urban sociology. Performativity is understood as the reproduction by individuals and our environments of social norms that are applied to us through socialization and subjectivization. This performative subjectivity defines the framework of our agency in our societies.

DRAG(U.E.) introduces participants to a series of concepts and discussions, making it possible to critically analyze their environments constructed from these social frameworks and norms. The DRAG( U.E.) will include the following sidesteps: the first look (the performative approach), the twist (performativities of norms and realness), and the negotiation (institutional critique (Reimer, 2021)). These sidesteps will allow participants to understand the historical and social construction of their disciplines and their subjectivities within them in order to renegotiate them.

SS21 students:

Emma Ghislaine Marie Bérard / Sofia Chajon Gomar / Marie Valentine Catherine Chatain / Nina Thuy Cruchaud / Anton Robin Djerbi / Ali Elguindy / Marion Fonjallaz / Morgane Hofstetter / Sanad Jouhari / Julien Lafontaine Carboni / Gianna Morgane Ledermann / Claire Ana Logoz / Nagy Makhlouf / Lino Tarek Marcé / Luis Melgar / Maud Armelle Anne Nguyen Huynh / Jonas Pacific Nkiambi / Maria Ruiz Medina / Jessica Schneider / Fatema Sebti / Katarzyna Maria Stachnio

Graphical design by Claire Logoz.

Link to the fanzines.

Des corps dans la nuit analyzes the materiality of nocturnal spaces -its sensory, programmatic, atmospheric or separative qualities- and how they participate in the perpetuation of the capitalist and patriarchal domination matrix. Profusely fantasized and represented as time-spaces of all dangers, insecurities and risk-taking at the charge of the victims -often female-, the nights of Western cities are also claimed and invested as possible territories to subvert, divert, disturb, and transform the established patriarchal norms. “Making Space“, the title of the manifesto of the feminist architects’ collective MATRIX from the 1980s, announces an architectural strategy of resistance through space.

When Iris Marion Young defines in 2002 the notion of gender as: “a particular form of social positioning of bodies experienced in interaction with each other within historically and socially determined institutions and processes that have material effects on the environment in which people act and reproduce power relations and privileges among themselves”, she underlines the central role of spatial experience in the social construction of gender. The transformation of the inhabiting bodies’ environment, the architectural action, seems then to open the possibility of a subversion of the normative structures in action through the lived experience of space.

During this workshop, we began to unravel the night’s western imaginaries as a space-time of fear, insecurity, and abnormality, producing a gendered polarization of bodies and urban spaces. Through feminist/queer methodologies, we explored the night as a possible place to renegotiate domination patterns. We explored spatialized and spatializing subjectivities to outline how night spaces support these violences and to thwart them. The transformation of our bodies’ environment -from clothing to the street- will be a vector for a possible resistance through space. We will delve into protection, spectacularization, disappearance, disturbance as strategies of performative self-defense, on the surface of the skin, through the lived sensory experience of a gendered body in its constructed environment.

To approach these mechanisms and potentially subvert them, each group of students combined a night site in the city of Geneva, an architectural project strategy, as well as a film/series/novel scene. These combinations allowed them to situate and position their research. The scene, translated to the Geneva site, allowed us to analyze the intersection of time, space and social situations, considering the bodies, socializations and subjectivities that inhabit the night world.

To embody these intersections of human and non-human bodies, temporalities, and social processes, we worked during the week on the construction of photographs that stage and situate the performative objects and bodies. Mock-up, collage, and drawing have been used to construct the frame, the point of view, and the elements of each scene.

Students: Nour Keller (EPFL), Valentine Robin (HEAD Bijoux), Ilona Roux (HEAD Mode), Meryem Saffi (HEAD EPFL), Fanny Tauxe (HEAD AI), Léa Porretta (HEAD Cinéma), Lou Tissot Daguette (HEAD AI), Alice Proietti (EPFL), Léo Taillefer (EPFL), Salome Djeranian (HEAD Arts Visuels Cinéma), Aurora Lajci (HEAD AI), Théotime Serre (HEAD Media Design), Waldemar Fierro Rubio (EPFL), Mélissa Steenman, Louise Chappuis, Noa Sbaï.

Photography by Morgan Carlier, Pool Photos HEAD – Genève