ACT Guest Seminar 2nd October 2024

13:00–14:00, 2 October 2024

B38 Lenton Firs

 

In 2003, artist Monica Bonvicini installed a toilet cubicle outside of Tate Britain.  The stainless-steel combined toilet and wash-basin was a standard unit used in prisons.  Enclosed by a small room of mirror glass, the cubicle provided complete privacy while instituting utter vulnerability.  Bonvicini’s use of a prison toilet perverted the conventional use of vision in prisons and tensions between feelings of privacy and exposure - two concepts held in opposition in relation to conventional ideas about prison security.

This paper examines the role of architecture in facilitating and preventing privacy and the conflation of the prison cell as toilet cubicle. It is contextualised by the New Zealand Ombudsman's decades' long attempts to gain privacy for prisoners in Intervention and Support Units where mental health safety is argued to surpass needs of privacy.  It is particularly interested in the consequences of fixtures, the direction of viewing and the embodiment of privacy and how - rather than a complex engagement with how one feels - privacy has become administratively one dimensional.

 

Christine McCarthy teaches interior architecture at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. Her research areas include: prison architecture, architectural drawing and representation, and architectural history.