Several Too Very Many Ways (To Be a Tired Body)

pigmented butyl rubber, birch plywood, silicone, collected drawings by Harn Museum of Art workers, carpet

variable height x 50.5 ft x 50.5 ft

Several Too Very Many Ways (To Be a Tired Body) began with a series of workshops with the staff of the Harn Museum of Art that resulted in over 200 doodles, in response to prompts such as “Draw something leaking authority,” and “Draw the exact shape of almost.” Of those doodles, 74 were traced to produce a series of flat-pack furniture parts designed to be interlocked, assembled, leaned on, tested, and broken in various ways. Coated in a permanently tacky rubber that makes the furniture parts cling mischievously to each other, the shapes encourage aggressive and gradually destructive handling and misbehavior. Docent facilitators continually hand pieces out, restock the installation’s mobile shelves, and offer prompts to the public, who become co-builders of the work’s slow breakage and collapse.

facilitation by Lucy Edwards, Mari Robinson, Catherine Mahoney, and Gabriela Patterson; thanks to Jade Bennett, Errol Nelson, Eric Segal, Johann Rosalio, Hector Verduzco, Jenna Hartig, Rokheyatou Faye, Shay Marie Taylor, Caroline Davis, Alessandra Emery, and all the Harn workers; several photos courtesy of Foad Seyed Mohammadi

The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III) is:

• a counter-architectural firm
• a spatial errancy
• an institutional détournement
• an administrative irrationality
• a long-form refusal
• a corporate fiction
• a covert tenderness

The III starts with a question: what can we build inside systems not designed for us?

A long-term parafiction by Conrad Cheung, the III is a one-person architecture firm that researches, designs, and builds in places shaped by historical and political hostility. It co-opts the building blocks of the institution — spaces, policies, speeches, risk assessments, brand campaigns — to stage unsanctioned affects and relations: critical care, dangerous play, joy without legitimacy, grief without closure.