HAUNTED REAL ESTATE

For the past seven years, I've been doing research on haunting. I see haunting as a productive connector between past and future, territories and actors, bodies and environments, memory and place. I see ghosts not as paranormal entities but as technological operations that mobilize highly sophisticated modes of knowledge production. I'm particularly interested in how haunting serves as a critical lens through which we might examine the entanglements of technology, architecture, bodies, and power.

This approach might initially seem counterintuitive for those who position ghosts in the realm of the irrational or superstitious. But I'm interested in how haunting functions as a critical tool that emerges precisely at moments of technological and social transition, revealing hidden operations and anxieties embedded within our seemingly rational systems.

This research has followed many paths, including essays, photographs, filmed interviews, drawings, models, and performance lectures.

The scope of the investigation is also ambitious: starting with 19th century spiritualist mediums near Rochester, NY, all the way to contemporary psychic shops, and haunted attractions like the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. I am currently working on a visual video-essay connecting some of these stories.

WRITING

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University of Rochester, Invisible Culture Journal, Issue 31
[2021] Essay: “The House that Ghosts Built (and Mediums Performed).”
Read here

The Architectural League of New York, Urban Omnibus
[2021] Essay: “Past, Present, Futures. An Architectural Tour Through New York’s Psychic Histories.”
Read here

Columbia Books on Architecture, Avery Shorts, Season 03, Episode 20
[2020] Essay: “The Psychic Glasshouse.”

Het Nieuwe Instituut, And Other Specters Series
[2020] Essay: “Haunted Real Estate. The Gendered Architectures of the US Victorian Landscape.”
Read here

The New York Review of Architecture, Issue #3
[2019] Essay: “Whatever happened to New York City’s Ectoplasms.”

MODEL

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A three-dimensional model choreographs the architectures of haunting as a playground for experimenting with curatorial strategies and technologies, reactivating the haunted house and its architectural features in unexpected ways. This piece works as an immersive experience that puts to use the machinery employed in haunted attractions to re-enact historical events while speculating on visual counter strategies to withstand the automatic responses that attractions like the Winchester house have naturalised.

The model is divided into three scenes representing specific case studies of landmark episodes in the history of turn of the century spiritualism in the US; the Harvard investigation in 1924 for the Society of Psychical Research Prize, the Harry Houdini anti-spiritualist Crusade Tour, and the Schrenck-Notzing reports on The Phenomena of Materialization. These scenes track the evolution of one of the most characteristic devices employed for otherworldly exchanges - the medium's cabinets, a progression that can be paralleled to the transition from Victorian to modern architecture.