Unstraight Matter (Queer Affects in a Vibrant World) is the topic of this years 4th semester BA Artistic Methods foundation course in Fine Art. 

Unstraight Matter is a course on how matter feels, pulls, disrupts, and reorients us. This course introduces the idea of queer material intervention: using artistic making to challenge normative orientations of bodies, objects, and spaces.

In a broader sense, queering refers to a critical and creative strategy of questioning, unsettling, and reworking dominant norms, categories, and assumptions, using disruption, reorientation, and experimentation to imagine alternative ways of organizing bodies, objects, relations, and spaces beyond what is considered normal or natural. 

This course blends theoretical inquiry with studio-based art practice, asking students to translate concepts from thinkers like Sarah Ahmed and Jane Bennett into material, sensory, and spatial experiments. Through the use of a mix of medias, like sculpture, video, installation, performance, painting and writing, students experiment with materials, forms, and spatial arrangements to explore how queer affects and vibrant matter can be activated, reoriented, or disrupted.

The course is for all 180 BA architecture students and is taught by a teaching team of five professional artists, led by Prof. Sophie Erlund. The teaching team consists of: Anna Pasco Bolta, Dominik Cosentino, Fid Fischer and Michael Mieskes.