
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.


