Ulrike steven & elke krasny
2025

An exchange of short letters between feminist cultural theorist, Elke Krasny, who lives and works in Vienna, and queer feminist architect Ulrike Steven, who lives and works in London, featured on Critical Entries .

Dear Ulrike

Can you share the ideas behind Queer Scenarios, which you initiated together with others at the Spatial Practices program Central Saint Martins and to which I contributed a lecture on care this year February.

Dear Elke

I understand Queer Scenarios as a form of spatial activism within an academic context. It grew out of earlier initiatives at Central Saint Martins, including Take Up Space—a FLINTA*-led occupation of the Lethaby window gallery over two months. Kate McAleer’s embroidered scarf, with the text “we couldn’t find a place” on one side and “so we made our own” on the other, encapsulates the necessary DIYapproach to establishing Queer Scenarios as a new, unfunded spatial research,practice, and dissemination community.

Right-wing governments are on the rise, and in this context, self-organisation and initiatives like Queer Scenarios feel crucial. Are we stuck constantly creating and protecting the base conditions—a relentless cycle of care work—without ever reaching the space to design for planetary care?

Dear Ulrike

Care is such a troubling and complex territory of concern for queer feminist spatial practices, scholarship, and activism. The global construction industry and its architects cater to the voracious appetite of capitalism. They are not invested in building relations of care with the planet. Care is exploited and extracted from bodies and environments by the colonial patriarchal capitalist economy, and regimes of care are used to enforce violence and domination. Architecture spatializes these regimes. Because of all of this care needs more care. Queer feminist spatial practices work for the restitution and liberation of care.