Queering of Spaces

Queering of Spaces is a feasibility study with several analyses exploring what a Queer Public Urban Space would entail. The study develops principles to organize space around producing culture from a Queer view. The conceptual proposal accumulates into a new urban public space enclosed by a cultural quarter of three transformed ground floor levels.

How can we shape cultural institutional networks to preserve the agency of queer pratices? At the interface of Queerness and Publicness, Queering becomes a tool for norm critical thinking to challenge the norms producing, structuring, and organizing spaces. Inferring from both Bernard Tschumi and Aaron Betsky, Queering becomes the event when queer bodies and objects interact with space, defining the experiences and transforms its identity. Through a Queer lens, the thesis positions Queering as a multidisciplinary program potentiating cross-pollination between plastic arts and performing arts. The institution seeks to empower the living culture of Queering as a social practice rooted in the methodologies of Queer communities to synergize with Oslo’s urban public art realm. For this reason, the urban analysis highlights the presence of Queerness in relation to Oslo’s cultural landscape. From this analysis, a site is inferred with an existing culture of grassroot street art. Seeking a place where creative nuances can be embraced through spatial and functional diversity, it predicates building transformations as the main strategy broadening the potential of spatial uses. The Oslo City Archives become a prime candidate for these transformations and for Queering; it is an old factory complex with a diversity of large halls still accumulating interventions. The proposal explores Urban Space as an institutional space across three levels with the allowances to separate and divide depending on the diversity of audiences, creating inclusive boundaries within the Queer umbrella. The institution aims to reconcile Queering by extending the spaces into the streets and vice versa, using infills to connect different street levels with the factory halls. Using two logistical spines, the complex’s physical constraints determine the logic of program distribution and separates the building mass into an audience wing and a production wing. The transformations reinforce an enclosed public space where events can spill into the street and contribute to defining the identity of connected urban spaces.