- New alliances
The project investigates inhabiting in relation to landscape and open space. Inhabiting is often linked to internal space, disconnected from the external environment and protected from it. Architecture becomes a tool for separating inside and outside, safe and wild, but are we sure that this is the only way to inhabit? The division between natural and artificial had evident effects on the environment, is it time to start an intimate relationship with landscape, considering it a place of life? How to inhabit landscape?
This research is under development through a series of performances in public landscape supported by NCTM grant for arts and an artist residency at Oficinas do Convento in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.
I'm going to use my body testing these ideas and inhabiting the public landscape in the rural area of Montemor for a month. The idea is to install furniture in landscape following its morphology and live the space as a house without walls, open for visits and encounters.
Inhabiting landscape is similar to choosing a new apartment, where you need to understand how to install your things and furniture. Take your domestic furniture and distribute it in landscape, the folds of the ground and the trees will define the rooms of the house. The furnishings will simply serve to make the open space more intimate and domestic, as mobile extensions of the person rather than as fixed components of space.
Generally, living is an indelible action marked by the construction of a house, a structure rooted in the place and irreversible (or reversible with heavy consequences for the context). In this case, living will be a light act on the earth surface. I’ll live everyday life in landscape by practicing temporary and surface occupation, open to encounters. My body simultaneously creates space and experiences it, the act of inhabiting makes this project a performance, a lived installation.
The domestic experience will be intimate, but at the same time will be open to the city community: I will install myself in public landscape in close connection with the center of Montemor, so that I can receive visits, hosting, organize dinners, parties, and participate in the city life as if I was living in a normal house. The opportunity to visit the performance will be communicated through the street gallery of Oficinas do Convento.
Stills from a video with preparatory actions in landscape. Before installing the furniture I had a research time through my body and perception, inacting domestic daily actions in landscape to start a relation with the sites and prefigure the house. The research started in 2019 with a preparatory performative part in autumn 2020 and planned final performance in summer 2021, which will be recorded in a documentary.
