stow objects home office
living room
bedroom
bath
bedroom
wc
cl
TĂŠo Pitella
cl
food pantry
kitchen
“Every man is a foreigner when alone in a crowd.”
Georg Simmel, 1983
I
f we focus on the political side of artistic practices we can see that even with the “access” created by digital media and the cultural effects of globalization, the small relations, interpersonal and non-international, are that ones that fill the individual universes and create our perceptions of world. The first established interaction with another man and with the “external” world happens through the relationship between the house and the environment, the universe. Through its walls, its windows that man handles the weather, face his fears and solitude, creating their first territory within the vast space. To Gaston Bachelar, in his 1964 book The Poetics of Space “Whichever the pole of the dialectic house/universe the dreamer is situated, the dialectic becomes dynamic. The house and the universe are not simply two spaces juxtaposed. In the realm of imagination, they urge each other in opposite reveries”.
With that, raise the definition of intensity of habitation for Gaston Bachelar, approaching the concept of shrinking, to elect corners for housing,for staying, and the need for horizontal aspects of home absent in apartments, like a garden that surrounds or a basement and a garret full of mysteries and protections. These relationships with certain corners or areas of the house, as the author himself pointed out in 1964, are disappearing and the imaginary constructions of this first territory are sparse today in playgrounds and common areas of large condominiums. As pointed out by Sebba & Churchman, these different spaces, some of individual use or shared, and public areas of activity, differ in the degree and type of control and in the individual behaviors and attitudes practiced there . The physical characteristics of these habitation units that affect these perceptions are are the size and quality of it’s boundaries in the private/shared interface.