At/ by/for/into/around the house

THE HOUSE AND THE WORLD

The House

The real estate crisis that has been widely covered by television news programmes

has stripped bare one of the myths of modern capitalism, the possibility of basing

the idea of one’s own house on the ephemeral notion of credit, an idea that

absorbs the dreams of all those who, like youths and emigrants, seek to define

a place in society.

However, the roots of this phenomenon can be found in a more profound

dimension. The binomial own-ownership, which is contained in the idea of one’s

own house, is at the heart of Western thought, as has been progressively defined

by modern rationality1. To a certain extent, modernity has been based on a political

and juridical effort to ensure the rights of individuals over themselves and over

space, making it indispensable that this be measurable and classifiable. Thus,

the difficulty in dealing with phenomena like madness, which jeopardised the

individual’s autonomy, or crime, which was an attempt against property, is not

surprising. Just as it is no surprise that the first major criticisms of modernity

were aimed at the idea of own (Freud) and ownership (Marx).

The World

The House and the World

In contemporary times the notion of own, an autonomous, closed and hierarchised

essence, has dissolved. At the same time, categories that were believed to be

easily charted, such as that of space, have lost their limits. Against this backdrop,

the idea of a house, as an incision in time that inscribes humans in the continuum

of nature, can now be questioned. It was this question mark that induced a set

of Portuguese and Scandinavian artists, or artists living in Scandinavia, to come

together in this exhibition project5.

Politics

Construction has always assumed a political dimension both on account of the

resources that it implies as well as due to the mark that it imposes on common

spaces. However, the discarding of ideologies, that so characterises our times,

allows us a privileged perception of the ways in which architecture and urbanism

served propaganda purposes and assumed ideological expressions.

This is the case of the proposal by Patrick Aarnivaara, who assumes the traumas

of a post-ideological age, later drawing attention retrospectively to the political

conditioning about architectural options while denouncing the symbolic vacuum

created by the present transformation of ethical values into market values.

The possibility of creating a world, inherent to Utopia, is present in the installation

by Artur Moreira. However, his work contains an element of ambiguity, clearly not

utopian, both owing to the absence of gravity in the horizontal/vertical inversion

as well as because it sustains an undefined temporality.

The house, and architecture in general, contains a less explicit political dimension

in the tensions generated around ownership as a principle of exclusion (the

homeless).

The house, and architecture in general, also serve to reconsider other categories

such as a sense of individuality, belonging, absence (temporary or definitive) or

exclusion.

Ana Bezelga evokes the meaning of unhomely Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) in

her work. The house, understood as a place of the self - of establishing an

individual in an identity, in a rigid structure, whether it is familiar or national - is

questioned by means of the strangeness caused by a permanent dislocation,

where contamination by the other becomes inevitable. A liminal zone is thus

generated, in which a sense of belonging is lost in the permanent transformation

between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, the house and the

world.

Maria Lusitano reflects on the relationship between the phenomenon of

emigration and the idea of a home6. By definition, emigration implies dislocation,

leaving a place, in contrast to the idea of a house that is associated with stability

and specificity. Between these two extremes one can find identities being

rewritten, a story of growing closer to the new place, expressed in this context

via a personal narrative.

The work of Shirin Sabahi, associated with the Swedish project entitled the “City

of the Future” in Malmö, describes the (im)possibility of nowadays conceiving

architecture and urbanism on the basis of a utopian perspective. In the midst

of tensions generated between the seclusion of the private and the voyeurism

of the public and the publicised, the notion of ownership appears here not just

as a principle of exclusion (distance from the other) but also of auto-exclusion

(distancing the self with regard to the other).

Private

The notion of property has political implications (the principle of exclusion) but

likewise highlights the role of the house as a space par excellence of a private

(familiar) world. This is where the links between individual and public spaces,

between architecture and urbanism, are situated. Links that have become

increasingly complex in a world where securitarism, caused by the urgency of

pushing away the other, combines with a virtual and intrusive voyeurism.

The work of Rui Mourão has a strong contextual component, in which the artist’s

personal experience combines with a sociological dimension. By presenting

images of a restricted community area (where the artist lived), Mourão draws

attention towards the difficult management of the public and the private and

highlights the tenuous boundaries between security and freedom, exclusion and

sharing, seeing and being seen.

The house, as a private, familiar place, is a space for recognition, one that

delimits identities. But it is also the first place for the tensions and schisms

through which the subject is (de)constructed.

By presenting twenty envelopes with the addresses of all the houses where she

has lived, Anne Marte Overaa recalls, in formal terms, minimal and conceptual

proposals. However, she subverts this heritage by means of a highly emotional

content. The house appears as a place to construct the subject. However, this

construction does not correspond to a linear process. On the contrary, it is based

on diverse tensions: between presence and absence; between the possibility and

impossibility of communication.

Isabel Simões reflects both about the house as well as her own painting. In

both cases the subject’s relationship with the world, based phenomenologically

on a corporised perception, is questioned via schisms between recognition and

difference, real and represented, visible and hidden.

Jakob Simonson sets out from the novel “The Castle” to work on questions

related to space, visuality, memory and narratives. This is not a direct citation

but instead evokes the way in which the Kafkaesque universe is constructed.

The potential narrative invites the beholder to inhabit this world but merely to

compare it with the absence of the place itself (understood as an organising

origin or principle).

Liminal

The way in which post-media postures - which value a generalised mix in an

expanded field – have occupied the place that modernist intransigence reserved

for the specific essence of each art, particularly questions architecture, which,

over the centuries, has incorporated other art forms such as painting and

sculpture in a controlled and stratified manner.

Fredrik Varslev presents two posters with 86 views of architecture that capture

the supposed view of a graffiti artist of urban space. The artist cites modernism

– manipulating the photographs to make them closer to modernist paintings

– while simultaneously eliminating boundaries – between each specific art;

between high and low culture – through an approximation between an artistic

space and a living space.

The design of a table presented by Eivind Nesterud expounds upon questions

brought by design to the world of art, crossing the single with the multiple, the

tall with the short. It simultaneously reinterprets and sublimes the notion of

object and authorship.

The work of Hans Scherer explores the conceptual frontiers between the notions

of space and movement or, more precisely, the way in which space - based on

directional vectors and variables of time - implies movement and, consequently,

the subject and the subject’s body. To a certain extent, it is the ephemeral nature

of the contemporary landscape itself, with its (re)configurations, alternations

and mutations, which is evident here.

* * *

The conjugation of the diverse proposals that comprise this exhibition

demonstrates that the binomial own-ownership is no longer enough when

thinking about the idea of a house. We are faced with a polysemic condition –

which is reflected in the title of the exhibition – as opposed to the dogmatism of

a rationalist heritage and the teleological idealism of utopias. The house, as a

place that contains the plural possibility of diverse spaces and meanings, unveils

its heterotopia .

Lisbon, September 2008

Ivo André Braz

Israel Guarda

At one extreme of modernity one finds the idea of the vanguard. One of the

decisive questions for vanguardism was precisely that of space. However, the

topos that was defined here was preceded by a prefix of negation. The term

vanguard implied a criticism and even a rupture with the existing order of things.

Its space was the non-place of utopia. Hence the strong ideological weight of

vanguardist projects and their dangerous proximity to totalitarian proposals2.

The belief in the transformation of ethics by aesthetics was also a belief in the

possibility of being able to expand the non-place until it occupied all existing

space3.

About a hundred years after the appearance of the first artistic vanguardists,

one of the ironies of history is that it was a late-capitalist society that absorbed

and realised vanguardist aspirations in an overall expansion of the aesthetic

dimension. But it did so by inverting its presuppositions. The ideological

dimension evaporated before the flashy banality of effigies and the virtuality of

the spectacle4. Simultaneously, the generalised macroscopy tends to dissolve

the question of space, eliminating the boundaries that structured it, albeit its

inherent tensions were still to be solved.

Sade’s preoccupation with subverting both categories, until the implosion of the ownership of one’s own body, reflects the importance

that this binomial has assumed for modern people.

Adorno’s famous phrase about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz echoes not just the clash with the unnameable but

also the emptying of utopia before the promiscuity between culture and barbarity.

Wassily Kandinsky. Do Espiritual na Arte (1911). Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1999.

Guy Debord, A sociedade do espectáculo (1967), Lisbon: Ed. Mobilis in mobile, 1991 cf. Jean Baudrillard, A Troca Simbólica e a Morte

(1976), Lisbon, Ed. 70, 1996.