by Adela Lovric // July 29, 2025
Despite its fluid and complex nature, identity is often reduced to fixed political determination. This spring, a conference under the research project Identity Crisis Network at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb addressed this concern, asking how contemporary art can move beyond established identity categories and simplistic labels to provoke institutional, aesthetic, philosophical and political change.
The conference brought together 20 artists, curators and scholars who offered various considerations of identity and subjectivity, drawing on their own practices and examples from across the cultural spectrum. Organized by Luka Cvetković, Klara Petrović, Michalina Sablik, Luja Šimunović and Vera Zalutskaya in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the two-day program featured a series of lectures, talks and performances.
Among the highlights was a keynote by Jack Halberstam, author and Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, who explored trans embodiment through the lens of the 1970s art collective Anarchitecture, departing from the work of its member Gordon Matta-Clark. Coined by Matta-Clark from the words “anarchy” and “architecture,” the group’s name reflects its unruly spirit and deconstructive approach to the built environment.
In his lecture, titled ‘Anarchitecture After Everything,’ Halberstam argued that “the only way to address the multiple crises that we currently face is to destitute the configuration that we call world,” proposing the language of anarchitecture as one tool for doing so. The lecture offered a glimpse into his decade-long research, which will culminate in a forthcoming book of the same name, scheduled for publication by MIT Press in 2026. We spoke to Halberstam about the research and its relationship to transness and contemporary art.
Adela Lovric: How did you come to adopt the idea of anarchitecture in your theoretical work?
Jack Halberstam: When I moved to New York in 2017, there was a retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the works of Gordon Matta-Clark. I went to see this show, and I didn’t know much about Gordon Matta-Clark, but there I was in the Bronx, where he did a lot of his work, and the show resonated with me as a kind of anarchist, punk, renegade project that really spoke to the current moment where real estate interests were destroying the city and subcultures. I didn’t totally understand the work, and so I began digging into it. I had been awarded a prize to write an essay and do some research on some facet of the intersection of transgender issues and the built environment, and I decided to see what would happen if we thought about the trans body through the lens of anarchitecture.
AL: How does it actually relate to the articulation of transness or trans politics, and how do you articulate identity through this anarchitectural language?
JH: It isn’t a direct connection, like “here’s trans politics, and now we apply anarchitecture to it.” It’s not like that. It’s more that anarchitecture provides a different vocabulary and syntax, and what we might even call a grammar for thinking embodiment in relationship to the city or to urban life or to the built environment. For example, we already use architectural terms to think about the body. We construct a self. We live in a body. We inhabit a self. You’re not at home in your body. We use all kinds of architectural terms, and there are whole books written on the mapping of the body onto the house or the home, by Gaston Bachelard or other people who have written about space and embodiment. So, if instead of using that language, we use the language of anarchitecture, then instead of thinking about adding, making, doing, building, we’re working with a language that is subtractive—moving, undoing, dismantling, cutting—and that makes a massive difference to how you describe yourself.
At the beginning of my book, the introduction offers what I call an analphabet of terms, like U is for undoing, A is for anarchy, D is for dispossession. It offers this language and this alphabet—or analphabet—to say, if we use this language to describe how we come into a trans body, it offers us other opportunities for thinking together the politics of the trans body and the politics of real estate, architecture, urban life and so on. So, if what the trans body is, is not the making of a man or a woman, but the unbuilding of the gender binary, that opens on to a very different political project.
Jack Halberstam: ‘Anarchitecture After Everything,’ Identity Crisis Network Conference, 2025 // Photo by Ivan Buvinić
AL: Where else in contemporary art do you see this language and approach enacted?
JH: Using the term anarchitecture allows us to read more carefully the work of a whole generation of trans artists, like Kiyan Williams, who makes beautiful public sculptures out of dirt and bricks that he’s salvaged from demolished building projects. Yve Laris Cohen often scavenges pieces of destroyed buildings to create a different understanding of the grid through which we see the body. Nicole Eisenman in recent years has taken to demolishing some of their own work that used to be in the old Whitney Museum, but they’ve also done big public installations of knocked-over cranes.
This work is unreadable if your framework is: transness equals making a man or making a woman out of a body that was assigned differently at birth. That’s a project that restores order, takes the contestatory energy of transness and quiets it down in order to stabilize the gender binary, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different project from the one that has a kind of anarchist intensity to it, and that, in the face of contemporary authoritarian opposition to transness, doesn’t say to the authoritarian regime: “oh, but we’re not dangerous people, we’re just like you, please accept us.” What the anarchitectural trans-political sphere is saying is, in a way: “fuck you. We’re not looking for you to recognize us. We don’t need acceptance. We don’t need legitimation. What we’re here to do is oppose everything you stand for.”
AL: You’ve also spoken about the concept of destitution. In the current multiplicity of crises we inhabit, how can destitution function as a response when we’re speaking about more than just bodies?
JH: I’m not speaking universally. I’m saying, when we use this language that is proper to or improper to anarchitecture, we’re able to think with theoretical and political projects, like destitution. Destitution is basically a version of abolition politics. Abolition politics doesn’t look for accommodation or assimilation. It looks to dismantle and take apart the society that gives to the rich and takes from the poor, imprisons people of color and lets corporate criminals go free, sustains gender hierarchies, white supremacy and so on. Abolition isn’t reform. Abolition is the ending of a social order. And dereliction is another way of saying that, but it looks to the built environment to do some of that work of taking apart the structures that govern us.
Jack Halberstam & Michalina Sablik, Identity Crisis Network Conference, 2025 // Photo by Ivan Buvinić
AL: There’s also a broader concept of “unworlding” that you advocate, which stands in contrast to ideas of utopia, repair and rebuilding. Why do you see unworlding as a more necessary project than worlding?
JH: Unworlding is a term that has emerged in recent years. I’ve been using it for a long time, but I’ve seen it also emerge in Black studies, in Afro-pessimism, in a few different places, as a way of saying, we can’t fix things locally. One has to make change through a kind of catastrophic unmaking of the world in which all of this injustice, inequality and dispossession takes place. Let me just give you a very basic example. Worlding is a little bit like saying: “we at this university are looking for a cure to cancer, and our doctors are working day and night in the laboratories to do this work. And we believe in 10 years, we will have a cure for cancer.” That’s worlding. It sounds great. Everyone’s down with it, but it’s nonsense, because you can’t cure cancer in a lab, because cancer is the effect of a polluted environment, a food chain that is full of chemicals and toxins. It’s the effect of living in a world that is being destroyed slowly, and now rapidly, by climate crisis. So, unworlding is saying: “we can only cure cancer by resolving climate crisis.” Those are different approaches. Worlding sounds good. It has a kind of utopian ring to it. It offers everything, and it generally delivers nothing. Unworlding offers nothing. And what it delivers is that nothing. It promises you nothing, and it delivers you nothing. And the nothing is a kind of stillness, or a stopping, or a receding from the pace, the speed and the toxicity of the current world that we live in.
AL: It’s hard not to think in terms of what comes after that.
JH: Of course, it’s always hard. We always want to know what’s next, because that’s the mystery of life. What’s going to happen in a minute from now? What’s going to happen in two minutes from now? But A) you can’t know. And B) the only way to change something in the long future is to change the conditions out of which that long future will emerge in the present. If we keep going the way we are with authoritarian regimes everywhere, no breaks on climate crisis, no measures taken to tax the rich, to help the poor, to deliver housing and food, basic necessities to people… if we continue in this mode, we can easily say what will happen next. We’re going to have a series of devastating climate disasters. We are going to have revolutionary movements violently suppressed. We are going to see authoritarian regimes around the world. We know what’s going to happen next. What we need to do is restore the possibility of not knowing what happens next.
Event Info
Identity Crisis Network
Conference: May 23-24, 2025
identitycrisisnetwork.com
Keynote Videos: youtube.com
