Lost Homes,  

Romances of Homecoming

Sculpture series (2013-2019)

 

“The house is an archetype, a universal principle, specific to human imagination . The archetypes are the result of a millenary experience ; they arouse a kind instinct that transcends individuals , races , countries and centuries .

This instinct , which has the strength of a vital need , translates into images whose symbolic wealth seems inexhaustible. [...] The archetype of the house appears to be a more primitive [...] its impact remains as powerful on that construction instinct as it is on a couple of swallows or a swarm of bees.”

 

Jean Onimus

 

" Our soul is an dwelling. And in us, often houses (...) We learn to dwell in ourselves (...)

They are in us as much as we are in them”

 

"The houses lost forever, live in us. In us they insist to revive, as if they were expect from us a supplement of the being "

 

Gaston Bachelard. La poétique de l’espace

 

 

 

 

We carry in us our old houses, our lost homes. Protective shelters of calm and warmth, our private homes always accompany us and define, through memory, our relationship to the living space. Built from our physical and emotional spatial perceptions, they teach us how to live space. Once lost in oblivion, destroyed, disappeared because of inevitable events, we can find our private homes through the awakening of imagination and daydreaming. Our happy memories, such as small-crystallized bricks bliss, reconstitute the roof, walls and doors. They determine the shape and size of the imagined home.

 

Under the reductive effect of spatial memories collected during childhood, our imagined houses take up a small and fragile architecture. They become spaces only penetrable through thought and are resilient keepers of the reminiscence and nostalgia of the being. Hence, they are our most important ‘intimate’ space.

 

 

 

 

 

On Shape

 

To evoke a universe, both bountiful and structured like the notion of home itself, I exploit the architectural archetype of the house in this series of sculptures. A space delimited by four walls and a pitched roof. This symbolic shape is meant to evoke metaphorically both the mental form and the concreteness of the house. Being hollow, it is a matrix capable of holding all the definitions of this intimate space within.

 

The house is a fundamental space for the being. This is the central universe in which we are received, in which we experience our first emotions, our relationship to the world, to space, to others and to ourselves. The image of the house is hence powerful and resonates with the affect and the imagination of the viewer. As a reflection of a privileged relationship with this shelter envelope that is home, my pieces speak directly to the subconscious of the observer and try to awake in them the recollections of their own intimate spaces. The archetypal traits, thus allow a mirror game with the piece and viewer’s perception and imagination.

 

 

Sleeping House, Hand-woven stripes of linen, 29 x 25 x 21 cm

 

 

 

 

On Scale

 

Scale takes an important place this series of pieces. The houses I fold, weave or build suggest more than a symbolic envelope without content. Contrariwise, they grasp a poetic reflection on the spatial perception of this intimate space, and break the common perception of the viewer on this commonly human scaled architectural space.

 

The change of scale in this series of houses, takes a symbolic significance. It questions the relationship between "human scale" and the perception of space as a physical and an emotional experience. Human scale can be considered to be a comfortable understanding of bodies in space. This phenomenon involves the sensation of ones body in movement in space and a sensitive, intellectual and subjective interpretation of the qualities of the place. No real disruption or break in perception of space, inferiority or superiority occurs when the viewer is in space at a human scale.

 

A change in the scale of the architectural space of a house, such in this series, follows another in perception along with a new visual approach. The viewer no longer observes an architectural space that surrounds him/her but is instead invited to mentally enter and inhabit the invisible space contained inside the piece. In this way changing the scale of the house is a way to disrupt its anthropomorphism and to query the relationship between the space of the house and the perception of that who inhabits it.

 

 

House to dream, Beeswax 23 x 17 x 12 cm

 

 

 

 

 

On Materials

 

The different materials I use to build the houses of this series, such as raw wool, flower petals, fabric, soap, beeswax or paper, serve two basic functions and establish a material and poetic dialectic that materializes in each piece. The first is that of physically delimiting a space for the notion of home to take place as a mental construction. The use of ambivalent materials, it resonates with the indefinable nature of the notions of home itself. Giving the sensation of being solid and fragile, or light and compact at the same time, these sculptures attempt to grasp the essence of home; A somewhat concrete yet immaterial place, an intangible concept and sensation.

 

The second function of the use of certain materials is that of awakening a symbolic and poetic force inherent to each one along with its organic origin. Each material has a story and a particular use, and according to this I create relations between them and ideas that revolve the notion of home. Protection, heat, nourishment are some of them. The presence of elements such as honey, earth or shoots of wild grass, sugar or paraffin equally contribute to the make of my pieces strong poetic images.  By tempting to arouse the souvenirs kept in our sensory memory, or involuntary memory, through taste, touch or smell, each piece beholds the remembering force of a Proust’s madeleine.

 

The creation practice I use, weaving with strips of cotton, raw fabrics sewing or folding non-woven textiles such as paper, refer to traditional practices characteristics of vernacular architecture. From the Latin "vernaculum", it originally refers to anything that is raised, woven, cultivated or made at home. My techniques approach this way to the architecture of people, the primitive architecture, architecture without architect.

 

According to Gottfried Semper, the origin of architecture would be confused with that of weaving and braiding. In his main work, ‘Der Stil’,he believes that architecture actually originated textiles. Flexible, foldable and robust, textile as in the lightweight architecture of nomadic tents, would be an ideal material for building shelters. He considers that the reason that prompted the man to assemble textile pieces to build homes was the desire to assemble and attach them together and then the urge to shelter, protect themselves and to close the space.

 

 

Immortal - Siempreviva, Statice petals ( Sea Lavander) and wood, 10 x 14 x 12 cm 

 

 

 

On Time

 

Weaving, folding, sewing and cultivating by hand are now less common practices in our industrialized society. These delicate and patient handicrafts, recall a customary activities and ritual of the past. They recall as well the almost cyclical duration of the repetitive archaic creating gestures.

 

Mircea Eliade in his book 'The myth of the eternal return', talks about the construction of the house as a creative ritual, a commencement that tends to restore the initial moment of creation of the world. "By the paradox of rite, any devoted space coincides with the center of the world, like the mythical time of "beginning" by the repetition of the cosmogonist act, concrete time, in which the construction is done, is projected in mythic time im illo tempore in which the foundation of the world took place. So are reassured reality and the duration of construction, not only by the transformation of the profane space into transcending space, but also by the transformation of concrete time in mythical time "

 

In my piece, there are two notions of time. The first is the time of the creation itself inscribed in the ritual duration. The second is the perception of time suggested by the piece itself. The time it takes human body to grow, a wild grass to sprout from the earth, the time it takes bees to make honey or the everlasting color of flower petals, an everlasting time. In the other hand, the constructing materials I choose, reminds us about the ephemeral existence of our homes and their transitory nature. In this way, each piece brings a special notion of time in relation to home; The time to build home, the fragility and briefness of the memories that constitute this space, the longing for a homecoming.

 

In spite of time, Colombian wild grass, earth, folded paper, pot, glass bell, 30 x 15 cm ø

 

 

 

On Nostalgia

 

 “To unearth the fragments of nostalgia one needs a dual archeology of memory and of place, and a dual history of illusion and of actual practices.”

 

“When we are at home, we don’t need to talk about it.” To be at home, is a slightly ungrammatical expression in many languages. We just know how to say it in our native tongue. To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you; it is a state of mind that does not depend on actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but the imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia”

Svetlana Boym, The future of Nostalgia

 

 

The origin of nostalgia, once a dread disease, is rooted in attachment to scenes from childhood and homelands. From the greek nostos – return home, an algia – longing, nostalgia could be defined as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never excited. In this way the nostalgic longing, emerges from a loss of the original object of desire; a place, a recollection, a certain moment. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, a yearning for a different place and time. The time of our childhood we wish to recall, the slower rhythms of past we fantasize with. Nostalgia can arise from the recollection of events that concern our history, individual and collective. It can be felt about events we did not live ourselves and people we did not meet, and our need or desire to grasp them. It is exaggerated affection for the past that reflects a strange disenchantment with the present and a foreboding about a future impossible homecoming.

 

In this series of work, nostalgia is the creative emotion that moves me. It is my desire to transform the immaterial and indefinable, complex yet so common nostalgic sentiment into poetic architectures of home. Each of the pieces in this series stands as a memorial landmark. Though the process of creation and the materials I use, I wish to suggest the unutterable names of places and times that live in us; our deepest and treasured territories of affection.