A Threshold of Evanescence for the Women of Bousbir

The red light district of Bousbir was an erotic theme park for men and a perpetual prison for the women within. This intervention re-introduces individuality and temporality through Light, Wall and Opening- converting the women’s weekly route to STI inspection into an extra-thick threshold between the two realities of Bousbir and the outside world.

In further dissecting Bousbir, I reread Bousbir as a “Potemkin city” where darkness was masked by strategically built “filter” for men in architectural and social layers; and applied 2 readings of the notion of “Religion” to the two social groups in Bousbir: Relegere/ re-reading (Western patrons) and Religare/ re-linking (sex workers). \nThis project is an intervention of two buildings and a gate along the route from the walled-off district to its external medical dispensary. Converting the women’s weekly route to the mandatory STI inspection into an extra-thick threshold between the two realities. The project challenges the roles of Light, Wall and Opening in Bousbir and works with these modest tools in (re)introducing “temporality” and the sense of “individuality” to the women within.\nAs the ever-changing quality of light is revealed in various ways through different properties of walls, the sense of temporality is transmitted; and the sense of individuality in a collective setting emerges as multiple perspectives converge through controlled openings. With these tools, three spatial systems of different light-wall relation were developed:\n1. Abstraction of wall: when strong direct light is given form and revealed by wall 2. Abstraction of light: when walls are revealed by indirect light (emergence of materiality) 3. Abstraction of wall and light: when wall and indirect light work together in creating an optical illusion of an extended reality.\nThree types of walls were then further developed accordingly on theoretical and technical levels, with which this threshold- a revelatory spatial sequence- was woven. As the filter constructed to enable the re-reading of reality disintegrates through this threshold, the re-linking to the distant memories of temporality and individuality is made possible.\nThis project is also an architectural representation of my self-exploratory process of leaving an extremely sheltered religious family as a teenager. The stories of three women- a woman of Bousbir, a handmaid and myself- come into one and materialise into this Threshold of Evanescence.