Centralizing the cut: a feminist,queer,crip response to powerful playgrounds

We were asked to stand and stretch, planting our feet firmly on the ground and extending our spine. “Feel your full length,” the workshop’s host recommended. Across from me, in this physically distanced circle of people, someone remained seated. Her feet not planted on the floor but on the footrests of her wheelchair. It was the kind of chair that I had hoped for as a youth, with tilted wheels for a faster spin. My need for a wheelchair turned out to be short term and I was standing in the circle now. The repeated emphasis on feeling our full vertical self, started to sound as if the host was saying that tall and upright is superior over sitting or lying down. The more we were breathing into our stretched-out spine, the more it felt like we were judging the shrinkage of our body’s telomeres. Surely, the host meant it well. But intentions do not immediately change the potential exclusion in a space. In a society in which upright positions are visualized as superior (e.g. in statues, but also the common illustration of linear evolution from monkey to man), I was rightfully sensitive to the fact that the host’s words were not just symbols: they materialized potential, separating one body from the rest. The standing majority.

I have always loved RAAAF’s installation The End of Sitting. I personally prefer to work while standing up, and I am typing this while vertical behind an elevated desk, bar height, the keyboard and mouse separate from the screen, for a more upright position. I dislike sitting down. I cannot, however, deny the many ways in which standing on two legs is privileged over sitting down. Why is it so radical when football players like Colin Kaepernick kneel during the US national anthem? Standing is both viewed as a sign of respect (standing up when judges enter the court room, or when your date arrives—to meet at equal height) and it demands respect. Nicholas Mirzoeff, media scholar and author of the book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, argues that Black sports players “taking a knee” do not simply reject the anthem’s false promise of belonging, they also kneel without the presence of a white man standing next to them, demanding their bend position. Mirzoeff (2019) refers to the statues in which a colonial figure is portrayed standing upright or sitting elevated on a horse, while indigenous people, enslaved and commons kneel, stretching their necks in service.

Declaring “the end” of sitting is discriminatory to those who use a wheelchair for mobility. As an artistic proposition, The End of Sitting can also be read as a disruptive gesture, hoping to break with naturalized hierarchies. Because in our current cultural archive, sitting visualizes someone in a backward position. Of course, RAAAF’s installation very practically responds to the sitting that happens in office spaces, while driving and having dinner. These are spaces in which sitting does not signify the beginning stage of linear progress. Here, sitting is portrayed as an acquired luxury and privilege. Sitting, indeed, is not merely an act, but calls attention to the distribution of time and space. Who gets to have office jobs or freelance from home instead of providing service for someone else’s comfort, who gets to drive or instead has to stand in over-crowded trains, who sits down for dinner instead of rushed snacking between multiple jobs? Rietveld (2019) writes the following:

Given global challenges such as climate change, screen-addiction and obesity, I believe that the possibility of breaking our habits is urgent at this moment in time. However, changing behaviour is also notoriously difficult. There is a huge gap between knowing that for example flying too much or sitting too much is problematic, and actually changing one’s habits in everyday life. (p. 33)

Instead of approaching sitting as a problematic personal habit, I take The End of Sitting as an invitation to think about the normalization of behavior in space. Then, instead of assuming that sitting is unhealthy or lazy, the installation’s critical view is not focused on re-designing individual behavior, but on dismantling the way architecture assumes certain bodily abilities, desires, and needs.

In crip theory and disability activism, it is common to view “disability” not as a personal trait, but as defined by society’s limits. It is not that I am personally disabled, the society disables me by not accepting my body as a place to think and design from. Adaptations and accommodations in public space are meant to make me function within the range of what is considered normal. In this sense, accommodations do not stimulate a radical reformation of space, but aid to participate in a general conception and creation of normal. Crip architecture is not aimed at participation of those people who are considered “disabled.” Instead, it enforces to confront how design itself barricades people. This becomes especially clear when reading Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip in which she also addresses accessibility in so-called “natural” environments. Kafer (2013) writes about the many ways in which a walking trail for hikers is seen as a good thing, getting humans close to nature, creating a deep sense of connection, and celebrating hikers who stretch their boundaries. Even though these trails are human made, a wheelchair accessible trail (one that is a bit wider for example, and without steps) is portrayed and rejected as unnatural and a disturbance to the peaceful environment. Nature is seen as a wild place and disabled bodies are excluded from this proximity to the natural—forgetting all the ways human bodies are dependent and require accommodation anyway. Whose affordances are centralized? What bodies are cut from nature and public space? What bodies could Rietveld centralize in RAAAF’s research so that an installation like The End of Sitting is not a disruptive cut to a general office space, but instead centralizes those bodies that are always already perceived as the cut—the bodies that do not make the cut; the bodies cut from the architects’ imagination, cut from the cut, thus creating an ableist design?

Speaking of cuts. RAAAF sliced an indestructible bunker, shape-shifted the New Dutch Waterline, and proposes to “un-wall” an Austrian Luftschloss from its heavy layers of cement. In the 70s, artist Gordon Matta-Clark split an abandoned house, carved an opening in New York City’s old cruising pier, and pierced a hole in the Parisian 17th century houses that were awaiting demolition to build the large Pompidou museum. RAAAF and Matta-Clark both cut: their main difference is location. While RAAAF inserts vulnerability, a sense of fragility, to a valued and indestructible monument, Matta-Clark addressed those buildings and grounds that were already considered fragile. Matta-Clark engaged with these buildings not to prove their worth or upscale their value by making them into art, but to convey the meaning of Nothing. Value and profit are fantasies, he argued. Fictive, but powerful. Nothing works, he famously claimed. According to queer theorist Jack Halberstam (2018), Matta-Clark did not just state that New York City was deteriorating. Nothing works was not just a description of a city in decay, it was also a philosophical statement. Nothing signals dispossession, it means not owning anything, not participating in the fantasy of value that prescribes to buy a house, or property, and sell it with profit. Nothing rejects speculative value. It is this nothing, this ideology of dispossession, that works. We should strive for Nothing, not aim to fix or progress from it. Matta-Clark’s cuts, Halberstam proposes, are aimed to dismantle, to take down walls. In capitalism, walls are necessary. Privatization allows for possession. Protection creates scarcity and demand. Walls stabilize power.

What happens if Matta-Clark’s philosophy of Nothing is taken up by RAAAF and employed not in those places that already have little value in the logic of capitalism, but instead is used to cut those buildings that are intensely cared for—often as national symbols? RAAAF reveals the vulnerability of buildings built to symbolize a wall: a bunker, a defense waterline, and a schloss. It works. Not Nothing works, but it. It has value. A contrast is created. It is art.

About RAAAF’s practice, Rietveld shares the following: “We enjoy imagining and creating such new worlds” (p. 8). Rietveld is enthusiastic about the new possibilities and technologies that can be explored with sand, “lying loose on the beach” (p. 17). Seeing the sand as potential brings to mind the colonial approach to geology and environment Kathryn Yusoff describes in A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None. Yusoff (2018) shows that geological matter is often portrayed as passive, inert, awaiting alteration, and manifestation by humans. The sand, lying loose on the beach, is lazily hanging out until a radical exploration arrives. Responding to the unexplored possibilities of sand, RAAAF imagines Sandblock. The scientific research that is necessary for its creation could contribute to new architecture and design, such as the Dunscapes houses. In response, I sincerely wonder: do we really have a housing problem, or do we mostly deal with a problem of distribution and a crisis of speculative value? There are plenty of empty houses and too many people without a sustainable home to live. Worrying about the future due to an increase in population—“billions of new people who will be living on our planet in 2060 will need houses” (p. 19)—disguises the fact that we are currently also unable to properly house people.

Vulnerability is not a physical state or a natural quality. It is defined by power: only those who are already visible can make visible. Those deemed visible can easily point out cuts, holes, and gaps. Vulnerability is not an addition, nor something that needs to be unearthed. The cut is already there: a space to be thought from. Not necessarily to be admired as a disruption—a commissioned hint of vulnerability—in an otherwise smooth surface. My suggestion would be to create fewer new worlds. Because what or whom is centralized in the creation of the new? We do not need new discoveries; we urgently need less of the old.

Why is architecture only for powerful people, people with money, Matta-Clark asked in the 70s. If art affects the technology that is created to change people’s behavior, whose behaviors do we centralize? Aiming to change the behavior of the powerful might not dismantle the structures that make power possible.