Exhibition at KADK, Foto by Søren Svendsen

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This installation is the result of a collaboration with Marta Fernández Guardado for the 2019 Biennale WORKS+WORDS at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts KADK in Copenhagen.

In times of densification, walls are coming closer, bodies are approaching each other. The tiny house is reduced
to the essential space that can house the human body. But how can home become more than a container? How
can it become a body itself? A (some)body that is there to protect and give comfort?
With the densification of the city that will raise the level of social stress, walls could become an intimate of our
body. We daily apply things to our bodies –clothes, jewelry, makeup– and interact intimately with things –coffee
mill, bike, bed– but we hardly think about architecture in that way. An architecture that is minimal, yet personal,
a character rather than a thing. Something slow that is lasting and that we can come back to.
Through narrative, associative texts and a spatial installation, the project investigates how space can be perceived
in close relation to the body, and how the architecture itself becomes skin-like in a phenomenal way. Blurring
domestic textiles and space, it proposes a sensual reading of the space that we call home –related to memory,
time, touch, people and things.

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Collaborators:
Amparo Battaglia, musician: The Bettzeug, The Dressing Gown
Anton Burdakov, artist : The Bookcase
Teresa O’Connell, writer: The Other Bedspread
David Estal, architect: The Naps Sofa
Micaela Ferrer de la Cruz, performer: The Guest’s Room Carpet
Sarah Hucal, journalist: The Felt Parrot
Ana Aguilera Madrigal, Designer (in the production of the fabric construction of the spatial installation).
Alexine Sammut, architect: The Carpet (or my favourite sitting place)
Markus Zimmermann. The Tablecloth, The Other Wallpaper

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table with texts

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The Tablecloth
To the left of the hallway there was the TV room. Pretty ugly in my memory. At the head wall next to the door stood the bulky television set. A dark box that inflated the cheek. In front of it stood several armchairs and a sofa in a loveless arrangement. Opposite the TV set in the corner was a round table with a coarse orange tablecloth on it, on which TV magazines and crossword puzzle books lay in disorder. This coarse orange tablecloth hung mostly to the floor, an ideal hiding place that I often used in the hope of being forgotten by adults, so that I could stay longer in the TV room and perhaps watch movies that were not meant for me. Because I could look through this coarse orange tablecloth when I held my right eye very close to it. I saw the TV through a fringed grid structure that abstracted images, but I saw the images and heard the sound anyway.
Aunt Hilde, my grandma‘s single sister, was with us quite often throughout the year, most of it over the holidays. I liked Aunt Hilde very much because we used to play cards and Halma together and eat chocolate and quarrel because we both cheated while playing. We also often watched TV together, mostly Bud Spencer movies. Aunt Hilde was a kind of female Bud Spencer herself. And Aunt Hilde cooked incredibly well; beef roulades with red cabbage and shrivelled flour dumplings. This is what she always made for Christmas.
One late afternoon or evening, I sat with Aunt Hilde in the television room on the couch clinging to her upper arm. Aunt Hilde had fallen asleep. The television program was about the human heart and the employment of cardiac pacemakers. Suddenly I saw scenes from an operating theatre, greenish-dressed masked people around a belly cut wide open, organs, a pumping heart. I was totally overwhelmed and scurried under the tablecloth. This operation—it seems to me in my memory—was shown for minutes. I was repelled and fascinated at the same time. It was the first time that I realized that there are structures underneath the skin. At the same time I could hardly bear looking at it, only through the rough structure of the tablecloth it was ok. I followed the entire operation with my right eye very close to the tablecloth. When I think of it now, I feel my eyelashes beating the coarse tissue. Maybe this touch also gave me the necessary hold.  _ Text by Markus Zimmermann

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