Queer Frontiers
Queer Frontiers
Provocation, Exhibition & Event co-curated with Kirsty Watt & Samuel Stair
Invited Guest Speaker Marf Summers
Supported by the Edinburgh Architectural Association and the Architecture Fringe
Custom Lane, Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland
15-22 June 2025
Queer Frontiers is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to explore the corporate capture of the ‘queer’ as we progress towards a future where the queer has become the norm, neutralised and fully shorn of its power to question, dismantle and reimagine.
Conceived and produced in collaboration with architect and PhD candidate Kirsty Watt and designer, writer and researcher Samuel Stair, the provocation was a imagined as sojourn where in the long days of high summer everything is not quite as it seems.
Queerness is everywhere, and nowhere. To be queer, and ‘to queer’, is not to subscribe to a binary or destructive antithesis, but to exist in flux and subversion, between the cracks and within the pervasive voids of the normative. Our setting is a time where ‘the queer’ is subsumed throughout and across the norm — trans-norm, if you will. Subversion here is ubiquitous, and ‘camp’ has morphed into its mainstream, palatable and profitable manifestation. We instead visualise queerness as a philosophical framework, of everything and nothing; to consistently question our imposed commonality, our understanding of a queer aesthetic is revitalised, and one that is ever-changing, rarely static, and never settled once and for all.
With a talk by artist and architect Marf Summers, followed by a group discussion, the project sough to reject the discourse that centres queernesses’ foundations as aesthetic, to question what ‘queering architecture’ means, and the extent to which anything and anyone can be queered – even you. The aftermath of the collective reflection and exhibition remained on display at Custom Lane for further engagement and as a queering of what an exhibition can be in and of itself.
Thank you to Custom Lane, the Edinburgh Architectural Association and the Architecture Fringe for their support.
Image: Project identity
