Brown Bags / Sincere Fun | In Collaboration with CARTHA Magazine

Brown Bags / Sincere Fun

“…‘queer’ defines not a specific sexuality, but the freedom to personalize anything you see or hear then shoot it back into the stupid world more distorted and amazing than it was before.” (“Queercore,” in The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader, 1996.)
 
We would like to invite you to join our event, BROWN BAGS, at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture in collaboration with CARTHA Magazine, taking place on Monday, March 18 at 6 pm in Architecture 2 Gallery. 
 
The event is the second installment in a series of queer meals. The first was Family Dinner, organized by Remus Macovei, Samantha Vasseur and Edward Wang at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2019. BROWN BAGS begins with a play on the format of the Brown Bag Lunch, which are traditionally combined learning/eating events, where training can occur in an informal setting. 
 
Alongside learning, the focus of BROWN BAGS is equally on eating—6 guests from Zurich, Toronto, Chicago and Winnipeg were invited to respond to a “Call for Recipes” by providing an image and a recipe that materialises their idea of queer architecture. Each guest will discuss and consume their creations in-person. Through this format, each recipe and subsequent dish triples as activity, provocation, and rhetorical tool. (There will be snacks for the audience too!)
 
Queering reflects a process rather than an identity. In recent times, our understanding of the term ‘queer’ has expanded beyond the conventional sexual binary to describe products and processes that subvert traditional modes of practice. Historical, literary, and anthropological narratives can all be queered. In this context, queerness can open up new ways of ‘practicing’ architecture. Queer architecture could signify work produced by self-identified queer individuals, work that employs morphological or aesthetic tactics associated with ‘queer-ness’, or be the result of an alternative modality of production.
 
Mining the possibility of a queer architecture necessitates approaches that subvert conventional discussion formats. To engage CARTHA’s call for ‘Sincere Fun’ at the University of Manitoba, BROWN BAGS proposes a performative meal and discussion, situated within the school’s design & planning gallery, as a way to open up new dialectics around queer space and aesthetics.