Rehearsing the (*) Bathroom: A Collection of Scenographic Studies

Overview

Who draws the lines? Who decides what is Nature? Rehearsing the (*) Bathroom is an autoethnographic and speculative research project developed during the final year of the M.Arch. program at the McGill University Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. Across 15 videos and performances, the project contemplates the relationship between policy, memory, and the formation of identity, asserting the gendered public bathroom—specifically the men’s room—as a political tool and preconstructed space of certainty which quietly, yet forcefully, conditions and homogenizes the/my body. Embracing the abject, or what might be considered taboo, each video and/or performance attempts to compromise assumed codes and dominant socio-spatial structures within the space through somatic and cinematic representations of embodied memories, daily rituals, and fabulated scenarios.