Cosmo-Clinical Interiors of Beirut
By f-architecture (Virginia Black, Gabrielle Printz and Rosana Elkhatib) | Professional (International category)
“[NTU GDAP] is an opportunity to absorb and reproduce some of the clinic environments we visited in Beirut–specifically those offering hymenoplastic procedures. The interior finishes, appealing to a hi-femme sensibility which hint at a luxury surgical experience, are remade into a curtained, clinic-like environment in the gallery, where we listen to the voices of women who have had experiences with the procedure (via our soundscape in clinic vr). Here the pressure on the body and its proper form is deferred to the interior architecture of the examination room.”
~ f-architecture
Cosmo-Clinical Interiors of Beirut examines the constructed space, interior finishes, and designed protocols of the plastic surgery clinic to make perceptible its role in shaping subjects, virginity culture and an ideal body. Here, architecture is understood as the confluence of the technological, social, and economic—not a built fact, but an organising force in a constellation of produced and productive objects.
The virtual reality experience presents moments within a landscape of commodified virginity, comprised of connected, masked interiors: a set of medi-cosmetic and vaginoplastic practices, which are purposefully concealed by an assembly of innocuous, everyday building envelopes, secured VPNs, discrete packages, and informal networks of designers, manufacturers, distributors, clinicians, patients/consumers and sometimes even the families of dis/honourable women. Visualising the spaces of these exchanges—of social capital, self-preservation, and power — illustrates how bodily ideals are operationalised within otherwise abstract registers: among the economic, regulatory, social and familial structures that govern proper relationships between bodies, often a relationship that serves men’s desire at the expense of women’s needs.
Location
ADM Gallery 1
About the Artist
feminist architecture collaborative (f-architecture) is a New York-based research practice and shared alias of Gabrielle Printz, Virginia Black, and Rosana Elkhatib. f-architecture explores issues surrounding the spatial politics of bodies and subjects, entities formed now more than ever by an expanding set of technologized relations. The banding together of these f-architects also constitutes an endeavor to realize some ideal feminist workplace, where enterprising women’s work–intellectual labor in particular–might be funded outside typical pressures of architectural patronage.
Their projects traverse theoretical and activist registers to locate new forms of architectural work through critical relationships with collaborators across the globe. Projects are located in New York City, on the US-Mexico border, in the Amazon of Ecuador, in Jordan, and in Lebanon. Winners of the 2019 Architectural League of New York League Prize, their writing and work has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Ed, the Real Review, -NESS, and Girls Like Us, and at institutions including VI PER Gallery, FRAC, the Morgan Library and Museum, the New School, and UN-Habitat.