URBAN TALK
June 29 2021, 11:00 | Online Talk

Queer Ecologies of Care

by Torsten Lange

The event will be held online via ZOOM under the following ZOOM-Link

Against the backdrop of our current ‘crisis of care’, this talk discusses the potentials for rethinking care and social reproduction from a queer perspective. It will highlight historical examples of ‘queer infrastructures’ in Canada and the US spanning the period between lesbian and gay liberation and the HIV/AIDS crisis (late-1960s to mid-1990s), focusing on the social, material and architectural relationships underpinning their making and constant re-making. Doing so, I will argue not only for the importance of attending to the social and material ecologies that sustain these infrastructures and their specific communities of users. I also ask to what extent critical historical accounts of the former can unsettle and destabilize normative, gendered (and frequently racialized) understandings of care, while allowing us to rethink of queer spaces away from thingness towards more fluid and complex infrastructural assemblages.

Torsten Lange studied architecture and architectural history and theory at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL in London, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2015. Currently, he is visiting professor at Technical University of Munich. His research focuses on economies and networks of architectural production in the (late-)socialist world, and, more recently, on gender, sexuality and the body in relation to architecture and the built environment. In 2019, he was a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, QC with the project “Queer Ecologies of Care”. He has published in journals and edited volumes and is the co-editor of archithese reader: Critical Positions in Search of Postmodernity, 1971–1976 (Zürich: Triest, 2021 fortcoming); Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism (special collection of Architectural Histories, fall 2020); Re-Framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017).