Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto
by Jack Halberstam

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time.

Anarchitecture describes the aesthetic practice of splitting and cutting, dismantling and undoing, unmaking, unbuilding, and ultimately unworlding. The trans body splits bodily coherence, dismantles the gender binary, and unbuilds bodily meaning. In these chapters, Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, along with Alvin Baltrop’s 1970s images of collapsing warehouses and Beverly Buchanan’s post-demolition fragmentary sculptures, return with a vengeance through the contemporary aesthetic gestures of Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, boychild, and Every Ocean Hughes. Anarchitecture unmakes space and offers a new rhetoric for emptiness. In its conclusion, the book explores this rhetoric through Renee Gladman’s anarchitectural experiments with language.

By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation.

About the Author

Jack Halberstam is David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of seven books, including Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance, The Queer Art of Failure, and Female Masculinity. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, he is the winner of the Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship and was recently the subject of the film So We Moved by Adam Pendleton in 2022.

About the Speakers

Claire Bishop is an art critic and historian based at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012, winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism), a book of conversations with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Cisneros, 2020), and Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024, shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award). She is a Contributing Editor of Artforum, a Guggenheim Fellow (2024), and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages. She is currently working on a history and theory of ancestralism in art.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of contemporary art and LGBTQ+ studies at Columbia University. As curator-at-large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, she cocurated the exhibitions Women’s Histories, Histories of Dance, and Queer Histories. Her books include Fray: Art and Textile Politics (winner of the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award) and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face. Her retrospective of Chilean feminist artist Lotty Rosenfeld, curated with Natalia Brizuela, is currently on view at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

Sarah Haley, Associate Professor, has research interests in the history of gender and women, carceral history, Black feminist history and theory, prison abolition, and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. No Mercy Here received awards from the Association of Black Women Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Southern Association for Women Historians and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 2020-2021 Literature for Justice Reading List. She is currently working on a book titled The Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966-2016. Prior to arriving at Columbia, she worked as a paralegal and as an organizer with the hospitality workers’ union, UNITE HERE, and was the founding director of the Black Feminism Initiative at UCLA.

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been featured at Venice Architecture Biennale, SFMoMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Istanbul Design Biennale, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Wilson has authored of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).

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