The Queer Salon #1The Queer Salon #1

The salon format is utilised to create a threshold space, to explore possible connections and to exchange perspectives on inclusivity and accessibility. Intersectionality serves as a conceptual tool for self-positioning and for identifying gaps and blind spots within the institutional practices of culture and heritage.

Due to the pandemic, the planned first session of the Queer Salon was postponed. Unfortunately, continuing lockdown measures have now forced us to organise the postponed kick-off event of the Queer Salon series as an online meeting. This is designed as a warm-up afternoon event with conversations with special guests and a keynote lecture by architect and queer theorist Olivier Vallerand, author of Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space. A first live event is planned for the second half of the year.

Watch: Talk with guests and keynote by Olivier Vallerand

Olivier Vallerand will talk about the relationship between queer theory and the built environment, with a special focus on exhibitions and design practice, the topic of his recently published book Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space. Olivier Vallerand is an assistant professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University. He holds a doctorate in architecture from McGill University, and has taught at Université Laval, UQAM, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he also pursued postdoctoral research. An architect, he previously worked for firms in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Montreal and Quebec City, and currently keeps an installation-based practice. His research focuses on identity issues and their relation to the design and experience of the built environment, queer and feminist approaches to design education, and alternative practices of design.

Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space reconstructs the foundation of queer critiques of space by analysing the representation of domesticity in contemporary art and architecture, while exploring the potential of queer theory for understanding, and designing, the built environment. Building on pioneering feminist work, Olivier Vallerand investigates how queer critiques question the relationship between identity and architecture. Unplanned Visitors poses a challenge to traditional architectural theory and history, and suggests a renewed and more inclusive ethics whereby architecture and design may explicitly address social and political power structures.

The Queer Salon series is part of The Critical Visitor project, sponsored by the Dutch Research Council's Smart Culture programme. This project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility within their organisations, collections, and exhibition spaces in order to meet the broad range of demands of today's "critical visitors". Parallel to the Queer Salon series, the project comprises a programme of Field Labs and Archival Interactions. The Critical Visitor project is led by Eliza Steinbock (Leiden University), Hester Dibbits (Reinwardt Academy, Erasmus University), and Dirk van den Heuvel (TU Delft, Het Nieuwe Instituut), and includes a consortium of 15 national heritage partners.

Het Nieuwe Instituut holds the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, and is the co-initiator of the Network Archives Design and Digital Culture. From its inception in 2013, Het Nieuwe Instituut has been experimenting with new, discursive formats in relation to its government sponsored assignment as a heritage institution. Within the fields of architecture and design, a queer and intersectional perspective remains underdeveloped - in stark contrast to the arts and media and cultural studies. The Queer Salon series therefore aims to further pursue this ambition in collaboration with the consortium of academic and cultural partners of The Critical Visitor project.