no drama house
2009 – 2012
Kurfürstenstrasse 12, Berlin
Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch
Kurfürstenstrasse 12, Berlin
Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch
The no drama house was built in Berlin in the garden of the Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch. I designed and fabricated furniture specifically for this house. Two Devonian Press publications were produced for this project. A performative event, titled PLAy, was held at the house and then restaged at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2011. A series of seventy microfilms was also made to document activities and gestures performed in and around the house. These films were shown first on the walls of the house, then at the South London Gallery as part of an event titled Cinonema in 2012. Arrangements of the furniture in various sequences were exhibited at the Kunstverein Langenhagen the same year.
I made a house with problems, not because I was attracted to problems, but because I was doubtful of their nature within the bothersome context of a spatial design whose function is defined as the resolution of these problems. To resolve nothing. To not find solutions and leave things in an open state, and then multiply. And then to let many problems, a suite of problems, problems of space, time, and means design a house and circumscribe an activity. The no drama house has as its plan the addition of one problem onto another, or their alignment. It is one meter wide, the electrical layout is uneven, it is too close to the wall, it spills onto the path. The house becomes a game and the life that takes place within it is the articulation of these states of affairs. Then, with time, these problems no longer hold. They efface themselves to become what they were dissimulating: situations. These function in a sequence, they condition and describe an activity that always leads to another. There are no stairs so I bring a ladder. I lose the ladder so I work downstairs instead. What at first seems like a spatial constraint is in fact only the nature of another space that we have ceased to neglect. The rooms are too narrow, there is too much furniture upstairs, none of the pieces of furniture can be moved without moving another piece, they form a line of which I am a part. That line is a sequence or a phrase that articulates what I am doing.
I sit, I work, I sleep, I sit.
The house introduces several equations:
living = writing, living = playing.