"A CASA / The House", is a project that began in May 2002, in Faxinal
do Céu, city of Pinhão, Paraná State. A project that came to life
during a meeting/internship attended by one hundred artists organized
by the State Office for Culture of the State of Paraná, under the
curatorship of Agnaldo Farias, Fernando Bini and Christian Viveros.
"The House", (or "The House Spits", perhaps one could think of it this
way) makes use of a real house/chalet typical of the region, a building
made of wood comprising a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two
bedrooms, a house that was also theguest
artist's home and workshop for the duration of the event.
The project "The House" explores the concept of shelter and, starting
from the familiar notion of housing, strives to establish physical,
metaphysical and visual relations about habitat, creating poetic
associations that encompass both its internal and external space.
The project consists in grouping together all of the house's furniture,
having it stick out through windows and outside doors. Closets,
benches, tables, armchairs, mattresses, cushions, these objects project
themselves through its openings, thrown up one against the other like
great weighty burdens, inflicting change on the house's design as a
"body", in other words, changing the object's original form. One could
perhaps say that from a formal point of view, the project shows
"sculptural intention" in its reorganization of an emblematic object:
the house. In this sense, one could say that the house's "outside"
face, where the objects from the house's interior are exposed, is not
created in a random way. It betrays an order, if not a constructive
one, one that was reorganized both methodically and rigorously.
From the symbolic point of view, the project presents an inversion or a
detour in the perceptual memory of the notion of housing, "vomiting"
objects and utensils that remind us of human presence, that are on
human scale. In spite of this, the house nevertheless remains
steadfastly itself, a house, an effect that, I suppose, creates a
certain degree of tension. An estrangement based on the very inversion
of the notion of shelter. It dislodges its human occupant, at the same
time reacting to its condition as a repository of memory, the guarantee
to psychological survival.
The project is neither social-art, nor psychological-art. It reworks
the artistic elements from which the notion of housing, or shelter,
seems to have gathered a sense of emotional safety both aesthetically
and visually, by reconstructing them and creating
formal tension. One naturally recognizes that the familiar objects that
populate one's home - mattresses, tables and benches - are forms, and
reductively, that they are geometric or geometrically shaping, forms. A
bench, for example, is usually determined by a circle or square resting
on usually vertical lines, a mattress, by a
rectangle.
José Bechara, Paraná, May 2002