GRACIASPORSUVISITA
CARDBOARD, INTERACTIVE SOUND INSTALLATION, VARIABLE MEASURES, 2007
The project is based on two main elements: cardboard as a material and as a natural container of life, in this case, and the sound of the reading of a “good housewife” manual from a spanish 1973 encyclopedia.
The objective of the piece as a whole is to make the audience interact with the sounds, since, when a number of spectators stand in front of the houses, the effect is the addition of the readings. Through them, the different family roles (head of the family, mother…) are established, and each of them carries out aesthetic and symbolic operations, which makes the situation become a small theater showing the sociocultural identity and the inner hierarchy of the group living in the house. Regarding this, the stereotypes of the inhabitants are established, and the way the space should be for them to live in it is defined. There is a very narrow relationship between the “I” and the “I”, the “I” and the “you”, the “I” and the “it”, the “I” and “the others” and the space where these relations are generated.
These interrelations tell us what the house actually means as a space. All these ideas are combined with the absurdity of a manual reading, which happens to be so serious and monotonous. In a different sense, the house is also a place to enjoy and to keep memories that create an identity and allow people recognize themselves. Our house is a scenario to represent our life, so to decorate is to imagine a life. The physical structure, the furniture, the social conventions and the images of the house make it moldable. They inform and, at the same time, they keep everything that happens between the walls. They belong to an environment created and decorated as a scenario to live in.
The meanings of the terms house, home or domestic arose great interest in art. Art spaces are seized by our daily life. This daily routine infiltrates into the iconography of objects that belong to our everyday life. The identified figures are in our closest sphere and show what belongs to our private life. Art and life get so close that there is barely a frontier between reality and representation, between the forms of what we have lived and the forms we have to represent them. The domestic sphere is not excluded anymore. It becomes the common space of the singular existence and also becomes politized in a controlled way.