react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

In a recent zine of short stories, poems, and artwork entitled FORCE/FIELDS published by feminist micropress Perennial Press, the editors asked readers to interrogate the “force fields” that exist around and within us, defining a force field as “a barrier that protects someone or something from attacks or intrusions.” While “force” can be interpreted as a physically tangible or more abstracted form of power at work, “fields” denotes a spatial, geographical, and temporal demarcation of such forces’ claim to authority. These might manifest in visible, concealed, or transitory forms, such as the materiality of architecture that shapes and constrains action, less visible infrastructures of surveillance, or more ephemeral strategies of performance and practice that resist or transform existing spaces. Whether fixed or fleeting, we are attuned to the gaps and malleability of fields of force that offer opportunities to reconstitute how power is embedded in space, place, and landscape.