A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble)

existing architecture, pine, spruce, maple, stainless steel, silicone caulk, inkjet on cardstock, hardware, cabling, servo motors, Arduino, altered construction cones, gloves, casters, radio transmitter, radio headphones, sound, altered military fatigues, PLA, glass beads, script, altered blazers, acrylic sheets, wigs

2 x 51 x 20.5 ft

stage, costume, and prop fabrication by the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures; performance programming by Seamus Carey, Adrian Wood, and Jayme Kusyk; graphic design by Nick Labate; special thanks to Emma Todd and Lily Bukalski

A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble) is the inaugural installation of the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III), featuring performance programs by Chicago-based artist Seamus Carey, Richmond-based artist Adrian Wood, and LA-based writer-director Jayme Kusyk. Converting the second-floor terrace of the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Hall into an experimental, modular structure that serves as stage, seating, and walkway, A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble) pairs the participatory, social demands of alternative theater with the site-oriented, spatial politics of institutional critique. How can a temporary, fragmented, and self-aware proscenium facilitate modes of playing, dancing, gossiping, criticizing, and otherwise making noise and trouble that the paradigmatic liberalism of the art institution can tolerate and endorse only insofar as it can make sense of “making trouble” as a properly creative, intellectual, and civic activity?

The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III) is:

• a counter-architectural firm
• a spatial errancy
• an institutional détournement
• an administrative irrationality
• a long-form refusal
• a corporate fiction
• a covert tenderness

The III starts with a question: what can we build inside systems not designed for us?

A long-term parafiction by Conrad Cheung, the III is a one-person architecture firm that researches, designs, and builds. It treats civic and institutional forms — spaces, policies, workflows, speeches, risk assessments, brand campaigns — as raw matter for misuse and counterproposal. It stages affects and relations those systems were never built to register: critical care, defiant play, joy without legitimacy, grief without resolution.

The III works in places shaped by historical and political difficulty. Its projects favor the provisional over the permanent, the participatory over the prescriptive, the contingent over the complete, and the improvised over the scripted to expand what infrastructure can be and who it can hold.