Originally published in Atlantis Magazine #33.1, titled (in)visible, this essay explores lessons from quantum physics to articulate the active power of visibility in shaping marginalized communities
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Across a wide array of disciplines, there is a renewed emphasis on making under-recognized communities more “visible.” While this is undoubtedly a vital part of justice efforts, this approach disproportionately attends to the observer as the focus of operation. This visibility framework works to make mainstream perspectives be confronted by and inclusive of the narratives and histories of people who were previously ignored, silenced, or disenfranchised. However, it often glazes over the complex operations that occur to and within “invisible” communities during their shift into mainstream visibility. This complex shift draws interesting comparisons to work in quantum physics which posits the existence of “quantum superposition,” a state of being which is unknowable and fundamentally altered upon observation. Queerness operates similarly–as it becomes increasingly visible and observable to the mainstream public, it is fundamentally altered as a social system and community. Architecture often participates in the visibility framework, seeking to uplift marginalized queerness through increasing its visibility to the mainstream, but in doing so it causes transmutational shifts within the queer community that go beyond architecture’s ability to predict or control.
Twister! By Other Means is a super-urban transit system in Beirut that seeks to reframe the agency of Beirut's Future War. The Future War's reintroduction into the built environment builds protective structures that might reduce the harm of the inevitable conflicts in Beirut's future. This project was developed as a Thesis in conjunction with the research paper "Reintroducing Non-Human Architectural Authorship"
This undergraduate thesis paper was produced under the guidance of Douglas Jackson at California Polytechnic State University. It was conceived alongside the design project Twister! By Other Means as a philosophical reframing of the human relationship to autonomy and environment.