30/06/2014
Welcome Home, the second project by Nism
For many of us the years of our youth (and perhaps even after that) are characterized by the many houses and apartments we have been living in: indeed one of the symptoms of our increasingly mobile society is the never-ending carousel of share houses and apartments we have resided in. And an important of this cycle is the time we set aside to go and inspect the proprieties that catch our attention on real estate websites and billboards. We write down the time and date of the next open inspection, or book one by phone or email; and then we find ourselves being toured through the home we have seen on our computer screen, perhaps with other people or just with the agent we contacted at the beginning. We find ourselves scrutinizing spaces that are situated in an ambiguous realm; whether furnished or bare, these are places-in-waiting; in a state of passage from one ownership to the other, a place we have been allowed to access for a very brief moment of time, a spell, inside which we project all our habits and tastes into one rapid flash. We screen-test our life in those empty rooms to see if this home can fit into the general esthetic of our hopes, ambitions, and fears. We can say that we are made of the dreams that inhabit, in the time they have been given, these homes-in-waiting. So the house we inspect is a powerful space of imagination, a psychological projection space. So much so that there are few other realms where we take such an immediate and truthful snapshot of ourselves, along with all of our present and future belongings, with such rapidity. we have had very strong depictions of ourselves in these rooms, and yet we forget about them very quickly; the memory of these places and the thoughts that took form within them quickly submerge, by the weight of the present and the immediate, which is much heavier than fiction and future. We find a strong analogy with a common gallery space; among other things, both are spaces of projection, both are usually bare for very good reason, and both are spaces of conjecture. The difference is that a gallery is automatically perceived and lived as a space that relates to art practices, while inspectable real-estate doesn’t. And that’s what makes a house in search of an owner so fascinating; its that not-entirely-blank canvas, that white cube, without the self- knowledge. We are thus proposing to visit these places through the procedure of inspection, and document, narrate, perform and reflect these spaces as if we were utilizing a sort of pop-up art space, within the time-frame that inspection allows us to have. We are immersed in the irony of disempowering Pop Up practice, that more and more commonly, fractures and parcelizes the public’s and the artist’s management of the work they make and view, and more in general, the fragmentation and rarefaction of one’s own life. Our lives are becoming kaleidoscopes, a collection of fast, overlapped gleams, like the ones we experience on inspection time. these places have such a powerful, yet temporary and subsequently forgetful experience on our psyche; we find these places-in-limbo still call on to us, the could-have-belonged areas, most of them dim memories, submerged from those of the places we actually got to live in. So we have decided to return to this spaces
of conjecture, not to experience them as spaces we might rent and live in, but as spaces where, for the time the real-estate agent allows, we think, act, deposit, or retrieve something to or from the house we are visiting. We come as artists and experience the space as artists that have been given a place to act on, for a few brief moments. Everything that doesn’t get us thrown out or cause damage to the propriety can happen inside the 15-20mins we can have in this sort of pop-up art space. A term that should reveal the bitter irony of these subtle, light, covert interventions, so similar to everything we express nowadays, especially in art; packable, removable, temporary, absurdly pop-up.WELCOME HOME aims to contest and provoke the idea of “art gallery” as officially recognized spaces hosting artworks; in this case artists release themselves from the definitions and boundaries of art galleries to bring into fruition different
spaces, public and private, in a subversive way, reappropriating the particular reality that surrounds them to practice art with an original approach.What would happen if we move art, and the artistic event that involves artists and spectators, in a lived, informal environment, with a different social role and a different spatial functionality, fragment an artwork in several places in different times?
The protest toward spaces is tied to the idea of artwork as object shown to the public in a definite place for a period of some time.
