Plans of Our Own – Body as Home

Planners are so paternalistic. Don't they know that people have plans of their own?
(Margaret Drabble, I Love this Dirty Town, 1969)

Die britische Künstlerin und Architektin Martha Summers ist im Jänner und Februar 2025 Artist in Residence von ORTE und arbeitet an einem Projekt, das versucht, die Geschichte der Medikalisierung des Geschlechts und die Formalisierung der Stadtplanung im Tandem zu betrachten, um zu sehen, ob Gemeinsamkeiten gefunden werden können.

Präsentation und Diskussion in Englisch. 

The starting point of this project is a comparison drawn between the paternalism of the Town Planning System and Trans Healthcare in the UK. Both are systems of the state, that require mandated criteria to be met for the applicant to make certain changes to their home, or their body. These criteria tend towards requirements that reinforce a capitalist, cis-heteronormative society-ensuring that binaries, be they architectural or gender based, are maintained, and unintelligibility and autonomy is outlawed.

In the UK a medical diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria is required for a person to make changes to their own body that the state deems incongruent with their gender assigned at birth. No diagnosis of a mental disorder, or any medical condition is required for changes that are seen as congruent with a person’s gender assigned at birth. In this sense, "Plans of Our Own" posits that the state grants you your body as your own territory only insofar as what you build reinforces the state’s power and economic interests.

During the residency in Krems, ideas about the commons, enclosure, land rights and the interconnectedness of human and non-human bodies and systems are traversed, exploring themes of autonomy, terrain and power. Increasingly it is only the wealthy who can enact change in their homes, the land, or their bodies.

The project looks at the history of the medicalisation of gender, and the legal formalisation of town planning in tandem to see if common threads can be found in these systems of control, and will consider and blend the DIY solutions and “hacks” that people find to circumvent planning and medical systems in the present day. The project culminates in an exhibition of drawings that transform and reconfigure architectural conventions, and an in-conversation event to discuss the work and the ideas behind it. (Martha Summers)

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