The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures presents The Threat, The , an indoor and outdoor exhibition that examines and rewrites spatial, material, sonic, and performative languages of security, sovereignty, and revivalism in the Global North. Its installations, performances, sound, video, and printed matter read the historical proliferation of security state infrastructures - defensive architectures, counterterrorist technologies, risk-management procedures - not as stabilization but indication of political precarity unfolding. Riot gear, Thomas Jefferson's serpentine walls, border surveillance, and more populate this long history of infrastructures that reify civic boundaries, choreograph state violence, and sediment unjust distributions of capital, power, and freedom. Local Jeffersonian architecture, for instance, encodes into the built environment not only the boundary but the loop: it traffics in a revisionist nostalgia, seeking to make spaces of the present in the image of the past. The temporalities that result are self-renewing cycles, references to references, quotes of quotes, that continually copy, paste, multiply, and abstract familiar architectural languages. Enacting its slow violence, the built environment is less thing than process.
As we aim to dismantle signifiers of subjugation today - names, monuments, buildings - to make space for other social possibilities, a nearby epistemic task sits unfinished: a radical remaking of what role our built environment plays in the political and civic imaginary. A state engaged in perpetual militarization and speculative counterterrorist practices produces its own imaginative vacuum, its own paranoid politics of the possible: we can hardly envision a polity today whose continuance is not bound up with securitization and, particularly today, the management of its borders. After nuclearization and 9/11, the fantasy of the security state, as anthropologist Joseph Masco argues, is a future without emergencies, every potential political disruption, protest, and incursion already preempted by administrative threat assessment and risk analysis.
Site-responsive, public, and multimodal, The Threat, The rescripts object, action, site, sound, and text using tactics from a range of theatrical, architectural, and activist traditions to grapple with the legacies and artifacts of the security state and to disrupt popular securitarian narratives circulated as pretext for state violence. The exhibition's installations are built on site only to exist for a month, its parts to be disassembled and recycled afterwards. This refusal of literal object permanence embraces temporalities compressed both by precarity under conditions of racial capitalism and by queerness as death drive, as a mode against the knowable, the commodifiable, the continual, and the monumental. If the built environment reproduces and is reproduced by our existing social orders, how might we, as architectural theorist Keller Easterling asks, hallucinate an alternative?
The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III) is:
a counter-architectural firm
a placemaking promise
a spatial hacking
an institutional détournement
an administrative irrationality
a corporate fiction
Working between alternative architecture and experimental performance, the III is committed to critically utopian engagements with publics and places.
A long-term project by Conrad Cheung (Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Virginia), the III is a fictional one-person architectural firm that researches, designs, and constructs. The project is undergirded by questions about the ethical complexities of labor, precaritization, authorship, and political accountability in global architectural practice today.
