queer space working group

Queer rage, aesthetics, and sound offer radical possibilities, using rhythm both as resistance and as a tool to de/reconstruct worlds. Today, on the spring equinox, the March edition of third rose, ALTAR, curated by Crltxxx (@carlmanz ) invites you to step into a liminal space. A moment for healing, renewal, hope, and beauty — a working space to present offerings and transmute our rage into something else. Most of the tracks in this selection come from emerging queer artists from Latin America and its diaspora. Embodiments of rage and hope. Pieces that transgress not only genres, but also what sound can do and mean today. Link in bio to read the full text and listen.

Home and Hope have three letters in common in English. The February edition of third rose, “a dream house,” by mystique, echoes toward the search of hope and home as a form of magic. The tunes make room for a durational practice of unruliness, of resistance against immediacy, against imposed gravity, a discipline of hope to imagine queer spaces that cannot be owned, emerging from a desire to have patience for what isn’t working. Substack link in bio.

June Jordan understood domestic space as a political form. Across decades of writing and image-making, she imagined interiors that shelter, sustain, and resist the spatial production of unfreedom—holding race, gender, and class together as lived, material conditions.

June Jordan, 1992, as cited in S.E. Eisterer, Introduction: In the Daylight of Our Existence, p. 12

New on the shelf — In the Daylight of Our Existence, edited by S.E. Eisterer. Taking its title from a moment in June Jordan’s 1991 address calling for radical transformations of the spaces we inhabit, this volume explores what it means to imagine, design, and historicize environments where queer life, care, and community can flourish without fear. Through essays, archival materials, poems, and visual documents, the book traces feminist, trans, and queer architectural histories and methods of resistance, refusal, and collective habitation across cities from New York to the Mexican borderlands. A generous, generative contribution to thinking about space, embodiment, and communal life in ways that push beyond normative structures — and a reminder that transformation begins with what we can envisage together. It features Malcolm Rio, M.C. Overholt, Candace Borders, Germán Pallares-Avitia, Torsten Lange, Davy Knittle, as well as Ladi’Sasha Jones, Molly M. Brandt, and Catherine George Weilein #InTheDaylightOfOurExistence #gtaedition Image: Rio, Malcom. “Architecture Is Burning: An Urbanism of Queer Kinship in New York Ballroom Culture.” In In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory, edited by S.E. Eisterer. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2025, 45–87.

In a moment where many of us are moving through conditions of perpetual disruption: fractured attention, ongoing grief, uneven ground, we’re launching a year-long playlist series conceived as scaffolds—temporary supports that help us remain present with work, uncertainty, and one another. The title of the series, 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘦, understands repetition as commitment—a reminder of what we return to, again and again, and what we continue to share enough to stand behind. In this sense, we thought it might be a grounding practice to share the music—textures, rhythms, lyrics—that hold us. The January installment, “𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘦𝘳, 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭,” put together by @verycolorfulbeads , gathers tracks that operate through fluctuation and resonance. Some offer shelter; others extend into exposure. Put it on and it will move at its own pace. Let thoughts soften. Let breath deepen. Let yourself be held. Across the year, this series will continue to foreground music as a way of staying with your mind, as something to lean on together. Link in bio to subscribe and listen. Graphic Design by @fakewingmaker

Opening the event series in Zürich, Alex Auris @alexauris organised an internal workshop for the qswg network, in which we shared and reflected on our personal and academic relation to queerness, architecture, and language(s). Gracias Alex for your lecture, your questions and making us reflect and share with each other! Thanks to the @house.of.differences for hosting us!

S.E. Eisterer @s.e.eisterer guided us in a private tour of the Sozialarchiv Zürich @sozialarchiv and members of the Verein Schwulenarchiv Schweiz René Hornung and Philipp Hofstetter presented “hidden” stories of refuge and persecution of queer people under Nazism. Danke schön to the archive and to our presenters for sharing with us! Danke to Torsten Lange @torstenlange79 and S.E. Eisterer for helping facilitate this visit!

A large part of our programme took place in a villa owned by ETH that was temporarily inhabited by the Chair of Affective Architectures (Professor An Fonteyne, ETH) as work spaces for their «Outcasts» thesis studio and the free Master Thesis «making home in dis-place-m•e•a•n•t» by Qianer Zhu @qnrrrrrr and Giacomo Rossi @rssgcm . In their project, Qianer and Giacomo «investigate displacement as an intrinsic part of the queer experience and [ask] how homemaking for displaced queer bodies can be a conscious act of resistance and resilience». This thesis was supervised and enabled by Prof. An Fonteyne (ETH), Prof. S. E. Eisterer (Princeton University), and Prof. Menna Agha (Carleton University). The collective living project ‘house of differences’ @house.of.differences emerged due to this investigation. During our event series, our hosts Qianer and Giacomo and Filo @filemon.ba made sure we had a home to live, chat, explore, exchange, eat, learn, brainstorm, drink, critique, question, rest, … Thank you for creating and sharing your queer home with us!

Symposium day (December 6th, 2024) at D-Arch ETHZ @arch.ethz with Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer @audreytsengfisch , Chong Gu @verycolorfulbeads , He Shen @he_shen , Dr. Anne Hultzsch @annehultzsch and Dr. Daniela Fuhrmann. Moderation by Demetra Vogiatzaki @demetravg and Torsten Lange @torstenlange79 . After a panel discussion on archives, history and education, we attended presentations on queer practices of homemaking by East Asian diasporic communities, and explorations on the creation of memory and identity through food. Thank you for sharing your work with us and our audience!

“𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐬” by Niloofar Rasooli @azadi.docx and Sandra Cane @sandra_malecane (December 7th, 2024) at Shedhalle @shedhalle . Thank you for hosting an emotional session with collective reading, listening and sharing your questions: How does loss shape us? How do the afterlives of violence inhabit our words? How do we write amidst the unending piles of horror, mourning, loss, and defeat? What does queer theory fail to offer in the face of terror?

Over the next couple of days we will be posting some impressions from our 2nd qswg live event, 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐞𝐫(𝐲)𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚, which took place 5-8 December 2024, this time in Zürich, Switzerland. We would like to thank ETH, SNF, Shedhalle, Sozialarchiv Zürich and all our collaborators, invited guests and audience for very open and honest conversations that helped us reflect on the topics of queerness and homemaking beyond the academic, and on a personal level.