Jack Halberstam: Keynote: Anarchitecture After Everything
Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading voices in queer theory, returns to Hamburg. With this keynote, he not only opens Kampnagel’s 2026 season under the banner of UNDER CREATION, but also lays the theoretical groundwork for a critical exploration of the construction site as a space of queer desire and possibility.Building on his previous talks at LIMINALITIES 2025 and Trans Through Trembling Times (in collaboration with HFBK Hamburg), Halberstam extends his thinking on trans* as a practice of undoing established orders, applying it to architecture and its politics. Drawing on his new book Anarchitecture After Everything, he introduces a grammar and vocabulary of “anarchitecture” – a language of resistance to existing conditions that defies linear notions of progress. What happens when buildings collapse, are demolished or unbuilt? When artists introduce ruin, abandonment and dereliction into sites once embedded in the circulation of capital? Against the backdrop of demolition, renovation and gentrification, the unbuilt opens up new perspectives for an anti-capitalist critique of property and alternative ways of imagining embodiment and space.Halberstam’s talk opens up a space for thinking about Performative Baustelle, an ongoing artistic and discursive programme that accompanies Kampnagel’s transformation as a performative process and social experiment. BIG MOMENT #1: Spatenstich by Daniel Dominguez Teruel and BIG MOMENT #2: SUSPENSION by Göksu Kunak mark the beginning of a series of artistic interventions that make the construction site itself a space for critical inquiry, opening up new perspectives on the site’s history and use, as well as on the relationships between bodies, space, labour and desire.The subsequent conversation and Q&A will be moderated by Luce deLire, philosopher and artist, and Professor of Aesthetic Theory and Practice at the University of Cologne. Her philosophical and artistic work engages with political philosophy, trans* and queer theory, and the power relations that shape social conceptions of identity, property and justice.The talk will be held in English.
