EOYS UTS School of Architecture

Masters Architecture – An Architecture of Relationality V: Territory, Border, Countermeasure November 6th 11:25 PM

Highlights An Ode to Ashfield – Marni Reti and Adelaide Lehmann November 6th 5:55 AM

Lectures Andrew Toland – Architectures of the Dirty Real: Projects of Affective Realism in Architectural and Landscape Culture August 27th 4:21 AM

Undergraduate Landscape – Granular Shifts November 6th 1:23 AM

Undergraduate Interior – New Socio-Cultural Imaginaries November 6th 2:08 AM

Undergraduate Architecture – ‘Housing’ Students November 6th 11:58 PM

Research Master – Distant storytelling October 23rd 3:22 AM

Archive The Architecture of Injustice: Behrouz Boochani Keynote from Manus Island October 11th 6:52 PM

Archive UTS School of Architecture Public Lecture Series – Spring December 8th 8:06 AM

Lectures Richard Hindle – Can Landscape Architects Invent Landscape Technology? June 19th 7:25 AM

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Highlights November 6th 2020
Hotel Quarentine or Beirut – Isabella Wells

Bioscopic Archives 

 

‘Bioscopic Archives’ looks at the current ‘conflict’ of the covid pandemic and examines the site of the hotel which in the Australian context has transformed to become the stage for the temporary occupation of hotel quarantine protocols. The hotel has become a political machine and acts as an extended and inhabited border condition that becomes a hybrid space that exists outside normal jurisdictions, allowing the state to extend its history of detention techniques, extractionist logics and controlled immigration, now only accessible to the privileged, through flight caps, fees etc. 

 

The hotel acts as a live archive of the state’s policies and protocols surrounding ‘foreign bodies’ as well as those charged with fighting the ‘invisible’ virus. As Judith Butler explores, these temporary sites become states of exception which are involved in “producing and managing subjects as well as a process of de-subjectivation – those that are compliant with the law, those that are without rights and human entitlement.” These sites become political pawns and objects of contention.

 

By conducting archival research, unearthing ephemeral artifacts, collecting eyewitness testimonies, and exploring new tools, technologies, and readings of the body the operation of hotel quarantine is mapped, revealing the infrastructure and hidden protocols of the operation: what bodies, invisibilised workers, technologies of control and surveillance and material conditions constitute this process. Through the production of a live/ living map or palimpsest the fragments produced by a time of crisis can be assembled and traced.

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