Campus HEAD
The Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève explores the role of interior spaces in shaping contemporaneity. To that extent, it organizes a series of reflections and interventions that aim to learn, question and visibilize how interiors play a key role in the construction of violence for inhabiting bodies and subjectivities.
Deadline for proposals: October 20, 2025
Dates of the symposium: February 23 & 24, 2026
To address spatial violence from within a school of interior architecture is to acknowledge interior spaces as more than politically neutral backgrounds. They should be understood not as mere decors for the everyday lives of predefined identities, but as materially situated conditions that actively participate in shaping social and political interactions. Addressing Interior Violences follows Michel Foucault’s reflections in Discipline and Punish (1975) by considering interior architecture as a set of biopolitical techniques of control over bodies and subjectivities – techniques that uphold the construction of the normal subject: that is, the considered-able, white, young, human, bourgeois, heterosexual, male subject. At the same time, it also questions its mirror image: the spatial production of the monstrous, excluded, dehumanized one. Building on the writings of Lennard J. Davis (2002), this open call seeks to interrogate the role of interior spaces in perpetuating power structures organized around the modern notion of normalcy. Divided into three categories, it welcomes proposals that have the following collective aims:
In light of today’s geopolitical context, marked by pervasive international violence against specific bodies and subjectivities, Addressing Interior Violences stresses the urgent responsibility of interior architecture to pursue the work of many to acknowledge and deconstruct its own complicities. Engaging with postcolonial, feminist, queer and ecological perspectives seems essential, not only to understand these histories, but also to reorient the discipline toward more just and emancipatory futures. We recognize that voices marginalized by structures of gender, sexuality, race, class or ability have historically been excluded from the discipline. This call therefore explicitly encourages submissions from those positions, which are considered central to the discussion.