UNWORLDING THE ANATOMICAL THEATER
IN UPPSALA
heyman@at-hh.com
An Artistic Research and PhD project
Funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project is being carried out at KTH, the Royal Istitute of Technology
Project leader: Malin Heyman (KTH)
PhD advisors: Helena Mattsson (KTH)
Meike Schalk (KTH)
The purpose of this artistic research project is to develop new knowledge on reciprocal relationships between the formation and upholding of racial logics and the architecture of the anatomical theater in Uppsala first constructed by early Enlightenment anatomist, botanist, Gothicist historian and rector Olof Rudbeck in the 1660’s. By studying the theater in light of its previously un-researched reconstruction, led by eugenicist and rector Nils von Hofsten in the 1920’s-1950’s, the project takes a closer look at this site of knowledge production central to both the formation of the concept of race and the institutionalization of racial biology within the Swedish context. Preliminary studies support the assumption that through the interaction of the architecture of the theater and its sociopolitical context, the anatomical theater forms a node in a history writing weaving together ideas of value, anatomy and origin in a narrative that, with the rhetoric of empirical science, defines a character for and asserts the superiority of a (white, Swedish) people (Heyman, 2021).
Professor Jack Halberstam defines a theory of “unworlding” as an antithesis to the utopian notion of world-making where “totalizing concepts [of “world”] have been predicated upon anti-blackness and the elevation of the human above all other forms of life” (Halberstam, 2022). This artistic research project suggests that the anatomical theater in Uppsala both models and embodies utopian world-making projects of Stormaktstiden and folkhemmet respectively, and establishes connections between them. The project aims at developing a methodology for a practice based and performative critical historiography for “unworlding” the theater, elaborating on methods previously developed in collaboration with other scholars and artistic practitioners, which are deeply indebted to Sara Ahmed’s writings on phenomenology and whiteness. Several of Ahmed’s concepts, such as “the willful part [...] that which threatens the reproduction of an order” and “the fiction of character”, understood as giving form to a system for creating truth, become operative within the project. (Ahmed, 2011) An overarching aim for this research project is to strengthen critical practice based research within the field of architecture, specifically bringing into focus the profoundly embedded structures of white supremacy within architecture theory, practice and materialization. Scholarship within queer studies has in my previous work as a practicing architect, teacher and writer proven effective in probing materialized structures of power, which is why this project relies so heavily on it.