ELASTIC FEMINISM

A feminist manifesto of space

for the once and for all de-whitening of the privileged discipline of interior architecture

by Denisse Vega de Santiago,

21st century immigrant
woman of color, e-ssential worker and interior architect

Elastic Feminism is a science-fiction short novel inspired by true events.

Set during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the novel follows the events that led to the uprising of the minorities of color/essential workers of the port of Rotterdam. The narrator of the story is Sol, a brown architecture student originally from an unspecified far away colony. After her upper-middle class family went bankruptcy briefly after the pandemic hit, Sol was forced to take a precarious job at one of the fulfillment centers of the P-CORPORATION, a Dutch online-super market empire at the port of Rotterdam. Sol eventually would become one of the leaders of the uprising after joining Las Estiradas (The Stretched), a clandestine revolutionary cyborg-essential-worker-squat. The novel depicts an imminent exposion of the ‘architectures of containment’ of the port, followed by a new social organization led by an anarchist, stateless cyborg gender- less society.

Elastic Feminism is part of an on-going long-term and transdisciplinary research project (2018 - ) on labor, structural racism, feminist theory and spatial politics. The project starts with the problematization of the elastic body of its designer; navigating between spaces of privilege as part of a highly-educated architectural class, and spaces of structural racism as an immigrant working class woman of color in The Netherlands. As a response to this problematization, the project proposes the notion of elasticity; distortion, fragmentation, difference, glitch, blur... as a feminist spatial strategy for emancipation, revolution and hope.