TS Eliot wrote The Waste Land in an outdoor shelter situated adjacent to this same building. In advance of the residency, I read this poem and was struck by his account of a encounter in which a woman is seemingly sexually assaulted – raped - in her own apartment by a man. Strikingly, the encounter is narrated by Tiresias, a character that Eliot has borrowed from Greek mythology. In Greek myth, Tiresias is a prophetic clairvoyant who, following a violent encounter with two entwined (mating) snakes, is transformed into a woman. The fluidity of this character became central to my encounter with the space. Tiresias slips through time and gender in a way that opens new ways of thinking about how a space can be engaged with. In Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tiresias describes the encounter between a man and a woman from the outside looking in, as if he was entangled in the materiality of the building itself. This feeling of being watched is familiar; women often experience life through a perceptive dualism in a bodily context that is always monitored and policed by the master model. Thus, the character of Tiresias became important, specifically in the context of the #MeToo movement that was building at the time, which was amplified by the accounts from survivors of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. Many of these accounts described a sexual assault that took place in Weinstein’s hotel room, and these accounts also seeped into the materiality of the walls through my encounter with the site in isolation.

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