Beth M Weinstein

Interests

Research

Architecture + the "Expanded Field," or critical spatial practices including Performance Design, Theater Architecture, Scenography, Installation, and Tactical Urbanism; Performance Studies and Dance Studies, Art + Architectural Theory, Critical Theory, Political Philosophy; Spatial Politics; Art + Environment; Spaces produced through states of exception (Japanese Internment camps; Algerian War camps).

Teaching

Architectural Design Studios working through "expanded spatial practices" including installation and performance, addressing environmental, public space and urban issues; Theory; Drawing; Performance; and Building Envelope Design.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Weinstein, B. M., Mcmahon, E. E., & Monson, A. S. (2012). Ground|Water: The Art, Design + Science of A Dry River. Tucson: Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry/University of Arizona Press..

Chapters

• Weinstein, B. M. (2020). Choreographies of Spatial Labor as Critical Spatial Practice. In Critical Practices in Architecture : the unexamined(pp 251-272). London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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  Jonathan Bean, Susannah Dickinson and Aletheia Ida, Editors
• Weinstein, B. M. (2018). Bringing performativity into architectural pedgagogy. In Performing Architectures: Contemporary Projects, Practices and Pedagogies(pp unknown). London: Methuen Drama – Engage series.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2018). Stage and Audience. In The Routledge Companion to Scenography(pp 6000 wd chapter). NY + London: Routledge.
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  contributing author
• Weinstein, B. M. (2013). Turned Tables: Public as Performer in Jean Nouvel’s Pre-Performance Spaces. In Architecture as a Performing Art(pp 163-176). Farnham : Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2012). Performance Space: Distributed and Consolidated. In Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011Prague Quadrennial(pp 60-73). The Theater Institute.

Journals/Publications

• Weinstein, B. (2022).

  Scenographic design drawing: performative drawing in an expanded field: by Sue Field, London/New York, Bloomsbury Visual Art (Drawing In series), 2021, 263 pp. (21 black and white illustrations; 8 unnumbered pp. color plates), $103.50 (hardback), ISBN 9781350168534; $103.50 (e-book pdf/e-pub & Mobi), ISBN 9781350168558/9781350168541

  . Theatre and Performance Design, 8(3-4), 238-239. doi:10.1080/23322551.2022.2133235
• Weinstein, B. M. (2020). Installing Performances of Spatial Labour. Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, 14(1&2), 117-130.
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  My doctoral examination exhibition titled Performing Spatial Labour (2019), and the four performance-installations it assembled, catalysed a praxis of ‘spatial labour’ to render previously invisible labour and spatial conditions not merely knowable, but ‘sensible’ (Rancière). Spatial labour, as developed through my practice-based doctoral research (2016-2020), incorporated architectural practices and building actions related to the ‘making up’, ‘making real’ (Scarry), and making sensible of spatial conditions. I employed architecture’s primary instruments—drawings, models, and texts—reinterpreted performatively to give precedence to the actions that call forth space or produce its ‘(un)becoming’1. I leveraged spatial labour to explore invisible spaces and forms of labour (in)activity associated with two sites of internment. The first of these were demolished WWII-era Japanese American internment camps in the US where internees wove camouflage nets, fabricated scale models, and moulded bricks. The second was the razed Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV), a detention centre in Paris from the Algerian War period used to prevent the interned from working.The exhibition immersed visitors in a multisensory milieu that choreographed their forensic2 (Gibson, Weizman) labour to make sense of the (in)visibilities within and of architectures of interment as evident in the four exhibited performance-installations: Intern[ed], States of Exception, Palimpsest and Razing Manzanar II. While the exhibition spatialised traces of these performance-installations, it also hid material, embodied, and affective labour, including acts needed for the exhibition’s (un)becoming—orchestrating, sourcing, procuring, forming, assembling, and recycling materials. The labour itself was obfuscated by its visible outcomes. Yet it was through not only the visible evidence of past labours, but also the visitors’ more-than-visual experience of the exhibition and their embodied detective work that the camps’ recurrence and invisible-ised labourers became sensible.
• Weinstein, B. (2019). Erasing, Obfuscating and Teasing out from the Shadows : Performing/installing the camps (in)visibilities. Performance Research, 24(7), 23-31.
• Weinstein, B. (2019). Performances of Spatial Labor. Journal of Architectural Education, 73(2), 230-239.
• Weinstein, B. (2019). Performances of Spatial Labor: Rendering the (In)visible Visible. Journal of Architectural Education, 73(2), 230-239. doi:10.1080/10464883.2019.1633203
• Weinstein, B. M. (2016). Prone to Collapse: a work and working through expanded and critical practices. The Center for Sustainable Practice (CSPA) Quarterly, 22-27.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2017). How three choreographers impacted the art world, public space, feminism, and more. The Architect's Newspaper.
• Weinstein, B. M., Douglas, M., & Oliver, J. (2015). Shuttling. JAR (Journal of Artistic Research), -(9), -.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2013). Performing Architectures: Closed and Open Logics of Mutable Scenes. Performance Research Journal, 18(3: On Scenography), 161-168. doi:10.1080/13528165.2013.818328
• Weinstein, B. (2011). SHiFT: A Performed Reinterpretation of Visionary Theater. Journal of Architectural Education, 64(2), 87-98. doi:10.1111/j.1531-314x.2010.01156.x
• Weinstein, B. M. (2011). SHiFT: A Performed Re-interpretation of Visionary Theater. Journal of Architectural Education, 64(1), 87-98.
• Weinstein, B. (2008). Flamand and His Architectural Entourage. Journal of Architectural Education, 61(4), 25-33. doi:10.1111/j.1531-314x.2008.00184.x
• Weinstein, B. M. (2008). Flamand and his Architectural Entourage. Journal of Architectural Education, 61(4), 25-33.

Proceedings Publications

• Weinstein, B. M. (2017, Fall). Intern[ed]: Between Past & Present, Invisible & Made Visible, (un)Mediated & Performed. In Crossing Between the Proximate and the Remote: Proceedings from the 2017 ACSA Fall Conference, 36-42.
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  How are architecture, politics, labor and invisibilityentangled? The creative work discussed in this essay,Intern[ed], seeks to reveal the erased architecturesof WWII era Japanese-American internment andthe invisible labors that occurred there and to drawthese into tension with contemporary ExecutiveOrders in which architectures of confinement andexclusion are latent. Through performance andinstallation, Intern[ed] shuttles between past andpresent, between invisibility and rendering visible,between remote and near, site and Non-Site,a-situated and citational, the mediated and theimmediately present.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2015, March). Setting and Unsettling the Stage. In Expanding the Periphery: Proceedings from the 103rd ACSA Annual Meeting.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2013, March). High and Dry: Performances Around Water’s Absence. In New Constellations, New Ecologies: 101st ACSA Annual Meeting,, 101, 131-137.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2011, March). Turned Tables: Public as Performer. In Where Do You Stand: 99th ACSA Annual Meeting, 99, 58-65.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2009, September). Performative Opportunities within the Parametric. In Spatial Phrases: SEAM 2009.

Presentations

• Weinstein, B. M. (2022, June). Le Centre d’Identification de Vincennes, performativité de la figure du fantôme (The CIV: performativity of the phantom figure). Le bâtiment comme trace du crime (The building as trace of a crime). Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (Paris, France): Université de Paris/Aubervillier: Campus Condorcet and RUINES.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2022, June). Performative remembering of and in razed sites of internment. Mellon School of Theater & Performance Research at Harvard University. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA / virtual: Harvard University.
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  How to performatively re-member a razed site of internment that has been mis-placed if not erased from the historical record? My research, employing forensic architectural methods, has pinned down and digitally reconstructed the spectral spaces of the Centre d’identification de Vincennes (CIV), a razed internment camp from the French-Algerian War period within Paris. To render this space of exception “sensible” to a broad community, I am currently researching means to integrate experiences of the augmented reality of the camp’s spaces in situ with events that assemble community. For this, I draw upon other site-specific acts and interventions as models for creating performative fora for discussion, debate and collective re-membering.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2022, May). Forensics and Fora: Reconstructing and Re-membering the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV). ACSA 110: Empower. Los Angeles (virtual): USC.
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  Abstract Accepted Sept 7, 2021. Full Paper submitted October 25. Accepted Dec 21. Presented May 19.Final session (2-3:30 EST): HISTORY, THEORY, CRITICISM: PROTEST, PARTICIPATION, PLACEArchitecture of/as Protest: Action, Place and the Concern for the WorldPaul Holmquist, Louisiana State UniversityForensics and Fora: Reconstructing and Re-membering the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV)Beth Weinstein, University of ArizonaPaper Architecture: Bureaucracy and Reform after 1968Ewan Branda, Woodbury UniversityRevisiting Civic Architecture and Advocacy Planning in the US & Italy: Urban Planning as Commoning and New Theoretical FrameworksMarianna Charitonidou, ETH Zürich
• Weinstein, B. M. (2020, October). Rendering Sensible (In)visibilities around Architectures of Internment. CAPLA 2020 Lecture Series. Tucson/Zoom: School of Architecture, CAPLA, University of Arizona.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2016, July 6-9). Prone to Collapse as Expanded Scenography. PSi22 Performance Climates. Melbourne Australia: Performance Studies International #22.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2016, March 18, 2015). Keynote Speaker. Transformations of the Prague Quadrennial since 1999. Prague, Czech Republic: PQ.
• Weinstein, B. M., & Hannah, D. (2016, July 6-9). ANTHROPO[S]CENIC PROBES, ACTIONS & ENCOUNTERS. PSi #22 Performance Climates. Melbourne, Australia: Performance Studies international #22.
• Weinstein, B. M., & Hannah, D. (2016, July 6-9). Performance+Design Working Group (PSi P+Dwg) Session. PSi #22 Performance Climates. Melbourne, Australia: Performance Studies International.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2015, June). Shared Destabilizing Practices within Archi-Choreographic Collaborations. Shared Practice. Prague, Czech Republic: International Federation of Theater Research Theater Architecture Working Group @ PQ.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2015, June). Shuttling through Atmospheres ~of weather, music, and politics. Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design. Prague, Czech Republic: Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design.
• Weinstein, B. M., & Mcmahon, E. E. (2015, March). On Tree Mortality through the Lens of Art and Science. Balance/UnBalance Conference 2015. ASU.
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  http://www.balance-unbalance2015.org/?page_id=427
• Weinstein, B. M. (2014, August). Bringing Performativity into Architectural Pedagogy. E-Scapes Education, Performance Design & Research ConferenceOISTAT.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2014, August). Invited Panelist: RoundTheTable Discussion on Performance Design Research. OISTAT Education, Performance Design & Research Conference. Sao Paulo, Brazil,: OISTAT.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2014, August). Keynote lecture: make:dance|space. Second Seminar on Architecture Theatre and Culture. Lab. of Theatre Architecture and Urban Memory Studies, Federal Univ. of the State of Rio de Janeiro: Lab. of Theatre Architecture and Urban Memory Studies, Federal Univ. of the State of Rio de Janeiro.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2014, July). Performance Design Working Group Praxis Session:. Performance Studies International #20. Shanghai: Performance Studies International.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2014, July). un|disciplined: postures | impostors in archi-choreographic collaborations. Performance Studies International #20. Shanghai: Performance Studies International.
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  Developing a discipline through training, and affiliation with that discipline through professional organizations, situates ones practice within such a discipline and operations according to recognized methods of that community. Moving from a position squarely centered within one’s discipline to the edges, the avant-garde, affords encounters with other discourses, tools, practices and paradigms, and with the messiness of otherness. This peripheral vantage point, from the seam between disciplines, between the familiar and unfamiliar, offers insight as to how the questions and modes of inquiry, tools, techniques and positions within one discipline are reflected, re-contextualized, transformed, even un-done as they swing across boundaries into other disciplinary terrain; as they are carried by trespassers, as contraband, between and across disciplines borders. When collaborating partners stand on opposing sides of the disciplinary border fence, how might shared generative practices and problematics be developed along the arc that swings between territories? And how might trespassers, impostors, critique and push the limits of disciplinary territories and practices, and model other paradigms? By way of case studies of collaborations across disciplines, and between trespassers, impostors, this paper will reflect on two modes of resistance against disciplinarity, critiquing “disciplined” practices and boundaries.

Poster Presentations

• Weinstein, B. M. (2014, May). Shuttle Daily Movements. Mind Into Matter: Bodies and Responsive Space symposium. Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Dalhousie University: Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Dalhousie University.

Creative Productions

• Weinstein, B. M. (2019. Palimpsest (CIV). un Lieu Pour Respirer. Les Lilas (Paris), France: Un Lieu Pour Respirer.
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  Lundi de Phantom no. 36 event and Performative Installation. Olivier Marboeuf, curator.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2019. Performing Spatial Labour: rendering sensible (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. Plimsoll Gallery. Hobart, Tasmania: University of Tasmania, College of Arts and Media. https://www.utas.edu.au/creative-arts-media/events/art-hobart/2019/november/beth-weinstein-phd-examination
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  Performing Spatial Labour correlates two seemingly separate conditions of invisibility currently at the forefront of architectural discourse. One is invisibility perpetuated through spaces of internment or detention. The other is hidden architectural labour shouldered by office interns and on-site construction workers. Through a practice-based investigation I ask how installations and performances employing architecture's instruments—drawings, models and texts—can make sensible, or knowable through the senses, the camp as a recurrent condition. Through this inquiry, practices of erasing, obfuscating and forensic un/re-making have emerged, contributing to a critical praxis that I call spatial labour.Exhibition dates: Saturday 30 November – Sunday 8 December
• Weinstein, B. M. (2018. Razing Manzanar II. Arizona Biennial 2018. Tucson, Arizona: Tucson Museum of Art. https://www.tucsonmuseumofart.org/exhibition/arizona-biennial-2018/
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  Rebecca Hart, juror.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2018. States of Exception. Cité Internationale des Arts. Cité Internationale des Arts: Jeu de Paume Museum and Cité Internationale des Arts.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2018. Work In Progress. Cité Internationale des Arts. Cité Internationale des Arts: Cité Internationale des Arts. https://architectureagency.wordpress.com/practice/interned/open-studio-cite/
• Weinstein, B. M., & Baÿ, C. (2018. Manifestez-vous!. The Window. The Window, Paris, France: The Window and the Cité Internationale des Arts (hors-les-murs). https://architectureagency.wordpress.com/practice/manifest/manifestez-vous/
• Weinstein, B. M. (2016. Praxis in Progress. PSi22 Performance Climates: INTERVENING IN THE ANTHROPO(S)CENE: PROBES_ACTIONS_ENCOUNTERSPerformance Studies International Performance+Design Working Group.
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  https://psiperformancedesign.wordpress.com
• Weinstein, B. M., & Mcmahon, E. E. (2015. Prone To Collapse. Arizona Biennial. Tucson, AZ: Tucson Museum of Art. https://www.tucsonmuseumofart.org/exhibitions/arizona-biennial-2015/
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  installation; environment designed and constructed by Beth Weinstein; projected imagery by Ellen McMahon based upon hemispherical photography documenting forest die-off due to climate change, from base research gathered by UA dendrochronology lab (Dave Breshears)
• Weinstein, B. M., & Mcmahon, E. E. (2015. Prone to Collapse. Balance/UnBalance Conference 2015. Phoenix AZ: ASU. http://balanceunbalance2015.sched.org/event/bb9cdfbde5004f59ed90f1e9e9100935?iframe=no#.VhQwsbxrg50
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  installation; environment designed and constructed by Beth Weinstein; projected imagery by Ellen McMahon based upon hemispherical photography documenting forest die-off due to climate change, from base research gathered by UA dendrochronology lab (Dave Breshears)

Creative Performances

• Weinstein, B. M. (2017. Intern[ed]. a performance – installation. Sundt Gallery, CAPLA, University of Arizona. https://architectureagency.wordpress.com/practice/interned/
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  How are architecture, politics, labor and invisibility entangled? Intern[ed] draws into tension the erased architectures of internment mandated by FDR’s Executive Orders 9066 and 9102, as well as the invisible labors that occurred there, with contemporary executive orders in which confinement and exclusion are also latent. The performance includes laboring at making and unmaking space, video projections, and performances of drawing/erasure and text.

Other Teaching Materials

• Weinstein, B. M. (2015. performing body:matter:space. IFTR Theater Architecture Working Group.
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  The proposed workshop builds off of a seminar-workshop course I taught at the University of Arizona School of Architecture and also draws inspiration and methodologies from workshops, directed by colleagues at other universities, in which the construction of space was explored as choreographic, spatio-temporal performance. In the context of schools of architecture the dominant practice is the development of propositions of space through allographic means or through scalar sketches, drawings and models of work(s) to be enacted by others in the future. This workshop proposes live, full-scale prototyping of spatial propositions, with particular focus bodies’ engagement with the matter, with the resistances of matter, and the emerging choreographies of the labor of making and unmaking space.

Others

• Weinstein, B. M. (2020, August). Performing Spatial Labour: rendering sensible (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. University of Tasmania. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/34786/
  More info

  This doctoral project correlates two seemingly separate conditions of invisibility currently at the forefront of architectural discourse. One is invisibility perpetuated through spaces of internment or detention. The other is hidden architectural labour shouldered by office interns and on-site building workers. Through a practice-based investigation, I ask how installations and performances employing architecture's instruments—drawings, models and texts—can make sensible, or knowable through the senses, the camp as a recurrent condition. Through this inquiry, practices producing oscillations between visibility and invisibility, including erasing and un/re-making, have emerged, contributing to a critical praxis that I call spatial labour.The research draws upon political philosophy's distinctions between labour, as ongoing process, and work, as produced object, and the centrality of performance as both the "doing and [the] thing done" (Diamond 1996, p. 1). The research also questions the invisibility or hypervisibility of creative labour. Spatial and temporal partitioning of labour shape sensible, or aesthetic, experience, and this "distribution of the sensible", as theorised by Jacques Rancière, is political (2004, p. 12). The ultimate spatial partitioning, separating out those reduced to what Giorgio Agamben names "bare life", manifests under the "state of exception" as the camp (1998, pp. 8, 174). As a spatial condition called forth through governmental, performative utterances, performance and architectural theories offer critical perspectives from which to spatially interrogate and performatively challenge these artefacts and their author(ity)s.The project is framed through two case studies of government-mandated and now-demolished camps. The first examines four World War II-era Assembly or Relocations Centres in the United States, created through President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Orders #9066 and #9102, in which Japanese Americans were interned and contracted to weave camouflage netting for the US Army. These internment camps were Santa Anita and Manzanar (located in California), and Poston and Gila (in Arizona). The second case study investigates the Centre d'Identification de Vincennes (CIV) in Paris created in 1959, under France's State of Emergency Law, to detain Algerians during their war of independence.Embodied, situated and archival research revealed five protagonists: sites, governments, building professionals, witnesses, and the interned. It exposed internees' labour, weaving camouflage, moulding bricks and fabricating scale models in the United States, and their being prevented from labouring and earning livelihood in France. Spaces, traces, atmospheres, and protagonists' renditions of their experiences informed my iterative explorations. I conducted these through architectural drawing and erasing, physical and digital (un)modelling and text-ile labour. I looked to precedents in visual and performance art practices of un-making, maintaining, and re-making space, as well as erasing and other (dis)appearing acts, as models of practice. I re-purposed architectural modes of representation forensically to uncover evidence at what Eyal Weizman calls the "threshold of detectability" (2017, p. 20). I shifted architectural practices away from making conclusive works and towards cyclically performed labours. The most significant performance-installation outcomes include Intern[ed] (2017), States of Exception (2018) and Palimpsest (2019). These explore subtle yet complex redacted, erased, palimpsestic, and scarred US sites, and the distinctly obfuscated conditions around the site in Paris, made visible through forensic architectural methods. The resulting drawn, photographic, video and material traces of these performed spatial labours were installed in Hobart's Plimsoll Gallery to choreograph visitors' experiences.Through critical and performative spatial actions, this research contributes to scholarship, creative practice and activism implicating architecture in propagating invisible labour and exposing the ubiquity of internment and the role of built environments as a tool of oppression. Performing spatial labour enacts this critique by rendering these erasures sensible.
• Weinstein, B. M., & Hannah, D. (2016, June 28-July 5). Intervening in the Anthropo(s)cene: Probes_Actions_Encounters. https://psiperformancedesign.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/interveningintheanthroposcene_book.pdf
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  How can art, design and events contribute to redrawing maps differently to represent comings and goings, meetings and partings, in order register essential actions that incubate sociality?How can we delicately probe environments in order to dislocate and then relocate our thinking about location? And how can we probe climes to critically recalibrate tempo and tempus?How can we free our senses to occupy landscapes differently, not as distanced passive spectators but as immersed mobile bodies, creatively endowing our inherited environments and despoiled shores to uncover more transversal dialogues and meaning?The objective is to explore and propose more meaningful understandings of landscapes – too often presented as distanced, picturesque and apolitical – as harbouring profoundly sonic, tactile, redolent and flavourful qualities. However, while they resonate with their own ancient spatiotemporal qualities, landscapes are more and more affected by recent histories to a point where human activities are now significantly impacting on the Earth’s ecosystems. This topical notion of the anthropocene requires we participate through greater immersive and sensory engagement with our natural environment rather than via the spectacle of a distanced vista: mindful of the part we play within the multiple and fragile ecologies of our lived world: minimizing the binary opposition between nature and culture and acknowledging that landscapes are a fabricated environments and significant public space. The fleeting event becomes a research tool for testing potential engagements between technology and geography, data and substance, intellect and perception, art events and the landscape as an event. This gathering adopts a tangential and critical approach to design by regarding the landscape as gallery, laboratory, and collaborator, thereby undertaking a form of creative acupuncture as performative intervention.As a global warm-up to PSi#22 Performance Climates, the PSi Performance+Design working group (PSi_P+DWG) organized a 5-day international symposium/workshop in Tasmania, hosted by UTAS Creative Exchange Institute, June 29th – 3rd JulyOutcomes of this collaborative event were shared at PSi#22 during the Performance+Design working group session.
• Weinstein, B. M. (2015, sept 2015). Available Light. Architect's Newspaper. http://archpaper.com/2015/11/in-doubled-light/#.VlJESt-rRE4