statement house (temporary title)
2015
Kensington Gore, Kensington,
London SW7 2EU
Royal College of Art, London
Kensington Gore, Kensington,
London SW7 2EU
Royal College of Art, London
Statement house (temporary title) was a house built outside the Royal College of Art in London in 2015. It is an attempt at creating a mix between living and writing. To do so, the house is the sum of the building itself, the furniture, the geometric elements indicating the possibility for it to have been shaped differently -plans with displaced bathroom, left-out corners if it had been a square-, and its inhabitants. The constant arranging activity of placing and displacing of these elements in and outside the house is the life of the house, and it is seen as an act of writing, and re-writing.
Two curators Katie Reynolds and Sophie Oxenbridge inhabited the house for its three months duration. Statement house engaged with poet Tan Lin, remotely from New York, in an extended practice of ‘writing’. Writing is defined here in expansive terms, to include a way of writing with the house’s furniture and parts, and Tan Lin’s daily tweet feed which writes the activity in the house by proposing scenarios, arrangements to be enacted or again, truncated. A twitter address corresponded to each part: @shouseRCA for the two curator, and the artist in the house and @shousetanlin for Tan Lin in New York.
1 The floor plan is the plan
2 The house plans to say what it is
3 The plan fails, this is the plan
4 The house is linked to another space
5 The house has one entrance and many entries
