Club Heterotopia
Within the Club Heterotopia project I have designed a mini stairwell party that sits within a larger context of the site building. This party space is a threshold space between one area and another. It is designed for the ephemeral, using an existing site and utilising limited and found materials. It considers ways of entry and movement through a vertical space that is usually used as a means of moving between levels.
Club Heterotopia is a project that explores the Kiki scene which traces back to the 1920s ballroom culture, an underground community that emerged in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance as a safe space for queer people of colour. The project also investigates Michel Foucault’s ideas around openness and closure and space and time.
“And if we then consider that the ship - the great ship of the ninteenth century - is a piece of floating space, a placeless place, living on its own, closed in on itself, free in a sense, but fatally delivered to the infinate space of the sea...The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.” Anthony Vidler, Michel Foucault and Pamela Johnston: Heterotopias (AA Files, no. 69, 2014)