At BAM Fisher in Fort Greene, NYC: Jack Halberstam on Anarchitecture After Everything

The Brooklyn Academy of Music hosts a talk on Tuesday, October 27, called Anarchitecture After Everything, in the Fishman Space at BAM Fisher. It is presented by BAM with The Racial Imaginary Institute and Greenlight Bookstore as part of Unworlding, NYC, a series curated by BAM Artist-in-Residence and Curator Helga Davis.

Anarchitecture was a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment. In the 1970s it staged a forceful confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects. In his book of the same name, Jack Halberstam finds in it a lexicon of transformation. He pairs the movement's practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness, which he argues detonates acts of formal violence in our own time. At BAM he will discuss this way of seeing bodies and the built environment, one that joins radical politics with trans aesthetics, in conversation with Avgi Saketopoulou.

Halberstam is David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of seven books, including Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance, The Queer Art of Failure and Female Masculinity. He was a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, won the Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 and is the subject of Adam Pendleton's film So We Moved.

Saketopoulou, originally from Cyprus and Greece, is a clinical psychologist and practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. She is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and wrote Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. She is finishing a new manuscript, The Offer of Sadism: Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetics of Political Resistance in the Anti-Reparative Turn.

Tickets are pay-what-you-wish at $10, $20 or $30. Online and phone orders carry a $3 facility fee and a $4.50 handling fee per ticket; box office orders carry the $3 facility fee only. BAM Bundle and member discounts do not apply. BAM is at 30 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn.