Learnings/Unlearnings

Lenny presented Minor Acts: Working Group for Queer Spatial Disobedience in the Civic Space strand of Learnings/Unlearnings conference at the London School of Architecture.

Minor Acts was a six-month working group hosted by Queerscapes at Queercircle in North Greenwich. It brought together LGBTQIA+ spatial practitioners and people on the edges of the built environment professions to make knowledge together. It was set up as a working group, not a training course.

The talk set out the thinking behind the programme. Disobedience changes who gets to speak, what counts as expertise and how knowledge is made. Drawing on Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, Freire and Vallerand, Lenny argued that what looks like failure belongs to the discipline, not to the people it leaves out. Lenny also argued that everyone is an expert in their own practice, and that the tools architects rely on, like the plan, the map and the crit, need questioning rather than just having queer content added to them.

The programme included toilet signage and infrastructure kits (Stall Tactics), a fungi and lichen walk on Greenwich Peninsula, collage strategies for landscapes, queering domestic space, and trans herbalism.

What we unlearned:

• Inviting people in isn't the same as sharing the process.

• Hierarchy has to stay visible so it can be negotiated, because it never really disappears.

• Hesitation and refusal count as knowledge too.

• Minor acts work at the scale people meet them: a sign, a map, a walk.
  

Looking ahead, Minor Acts continues as a method, not a toolkit.