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Public Talk

Anarchitecture After Everything

Date:

25 September 2025

Speaker:

Jack Halberstam
Professor, Humanities
Columbia University

Time:

4:00 pm

Venue:

Room 3.04, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Jack Halberstam explores the meaning of trans embodiment, borrowing a term from a 1970s art collective - “Anarchitecture.” The phrase stems from the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, who rejects the very concept of architecture itself - a structural body. Halberstam compares the spirit of “Anarchitecture” to the deconstruction of linguistic structures, proposing that Anarchitectural language offers an alternative to capital reproduction, by which once-excluded groups become new markets. Anarchitecture delivers a version of transness that does not seek to become a new vehicle for capital. Trans bodies, like Matta-Clark's buildings, represent an unworld within which representational systems can and do come apart. Rather than becoming a new platform for neoliberal marketing, the unbuilding of the body opens onto a critique of capital, real estate, and the realities that subtend them.

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