Architecture as emotional archive : Materializing trans* imaginaries through bodies, space and connections

Mike Lerjen

The project explores architecture and bodies as emotional archives to materialize trans* possibilities. This notion serves two purposes: first, it alleviates “homesickness” and the architectural impulse to restore bodies to their “original forms” by maintaining a continuous process of archiving. Second, it establishes a sensitive connection between the self and space through emotions, a connection that is both individually and collectively constructed. First, the archive is manifested in an axonometry in a 1 / 3000 scale. This element materializes the environment in which my non-binarity navigates daily, providing a broad spatial context. Second, with a layer of redrawn event posters, poems, and testimonies, which are sculpting my archive, as well as the ones I am connected to, and integrating into its spaces. Third with a collage of elements that includes: - A closet; - A police hotel re-envisioned as a center for hormone production, distribution, and consumption; - A tower repurposed as an operating theatre for gender reassignment surgeries. These sites of trans* social reproduction are developed in 1 / 200 scale plans, elucidating the detailed potential of these redevelopments while conveying flexible ideas. The interfaces are redrawn in 1 / 50 scale to trace the interactions between bodies and space. Part personal archive, part collective archive, this project aims to materialize imaginaries and delineate the contours of a trans* future, using architecture as a transformative device.

Files
Énoncé (PDF), Planche (PDF)
LINKS
Team
Teachers:
Dieter Dietz, Gianna Morgane Ledermann, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Supervision team:
Dietz, Dieter (dir. pédagogique) ; Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte (prof.) ; Ledermann, Gianna (maître EPFL) ; Szacka, Léa-Catherine (expert)
Professor in charge of the statement:
Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte (ENAC IA RIOT)
Unit:
ALICE, ENAC-SAR
Infos
Year:
2024
Period:
Master, Fall
Category:
Master Project
Copyright:
CC BY Licence
Theoretical statement

Trans* Architecture, a definition: A dive across generations, to Uranus and beyond

Permalink
livingarchives.epfl.ch/projects/6703/architecture-as-emotional-archive-materializing-trans-imaginaries-through-bodies-space-and-connections/