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.
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.