Thesis Advisor Paul Lewis

Secondary Advisor S.E. Eisterer

Special Thanks to Luna Eaton-Sharon, Pavan Vadgama, Sophia-Rose Diodati, and Ethan Luk

Additional Thanks to David Goldman, Robert Coddington, and Fort Gansevoort

Architecture negotiates a persistent translation between the three-dimensional object and the planar drawing. Just like any translanguaging practice, this transfer from one system of communication to another produces slippages, frictions, and generative openings. Orientations of Haunting negotiates these dimensional oscillations to reinscribe the domestic space documented by Nelson Sullivan in his film archive.

From 1983 until his passing in 1989, Nelson Sullivan recorded his daily affairs with friends—capturing the downtown art world and gay scene. Over the course of nearly 1,100 hours of stream-of-consciousness filming, Nelson documented performances at the Limelight, Palladium, and the Pyramid Club; gallery openings; pride parades and protests; house parties; and the quotidian dramas of his circle of friends including Michael Musto, RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Larry Tee, and Michael Alig among others.

Orientations of Haunting attends to the queer temporalities and now-absent bodies latent in Nelson’s archive to reinscribe his domestic space in the present. Using doubling and digitizing as queer world building methods, Orientations of Haunting reveals and communes the ghosts which haunt the archive and rehearses how drawing, when treated as a material practice, can orient us towards these specters. In orienting us towards ghostly presence, the project defamiliarizes and resituates space and time’s relation to each other and affords us a glimmering view onto a queer utopic horizon.