In this intervention at an abandoned building owned by De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB), I engaged with the material remnants of institutional architecture—broken tiles, shattered yet still holding the memory of a structured whole. By rearranging these fragments into a temporary composition, I enacted a refusal of the fixity of institutional spaces, queering their rigid definitions by turning ruin into a site of transition and possibility. This ephemeral reconfiguration challenged the prescribed permanence of academic spaces, asserting that the institution is haunted by what it tries to contain. The cracks in the tiles, the holes in the ceiling, the missing window pane, became fissures for imagining alternative ways of inhabiting and experiencing space.
Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s concept of the archive as both a site of power and foreclosure, this work disrupted the presumed stability of architectural memory. If institutions function as archives of knowledge and authority, then to repurpose their discarded matter is to contest the structures that define whose histories are preserved and whose are fractured. This intervention echoes Susan Stryker’s vision of trans utopia, where transition is not just a personal process but a spatial and collective one, a reshaping of the world across rigid borders. The reclamation of the broken tiles into an architectural assemblage materializes the transitive potential of space.
To “trans” architecture is to resist its excessive control. To acknowledge the ruin as not an end is the birth of a new world. This act of temporary intervention reimagined the abandoned structure as a site of radical possibility, where institutional decay became fertile ground for new forms of spatial existence. In the absence of walls, doors, and fixed thresholds, the space was transed—made porous, indeterminate, and open to bodies and meanings that institutions typically seek to regulate. Through this fleeting reassembly of broken elements, I invited viewers to consider the potential of architectural transness: a mode of spatial practice that is always unfixed, in transition, and forever becoming.
