Intimate House
Intimate House, (1996)
Video installation with four simultaneous projections in a square space. The viewer, staying in the center of the room, is confronted with a different film on each wall, experiencing a state of family loss and urban violence. The work is based on the demolition of a house in the Chapinero neighborhood of Bogota, inhabited by several generations of the same family. Its owners decide to evict, but take all its constructive parts with them to reassemble it in another place. The work witnesses the demolition, the last daily scenes, the move and the voices of the owners.
These women, urban displaced by agents of speculation, must leave the place of origin, of history, of roots. They must leave the house-dwelling that will fall to the blows of the urban merchants. An act that, although legal, is no less violent. An act of dispossession, of installation of the non-place, of cornering of the bodies.
This house ceases to be a private house, these women cease to have their own name. The machine that knocks down the walls, the hands that clean the cutlery, the windows, the dust, everything will be what it is, but it will also not be. Or it will be in another sense. Everything will become the sensitive skin of a metaphor that will speak of its time. The house, for example, here becomes a body. A violated, displaced, marginalized body. This asphyxia speaks of the country.
We participate in the symbolic production of a place, witnessing the corporal choreography of inhabiting in its essential and ritual roots. A creative dance performed here by female hands when they clean, sweep, shine, caress, heal. They activate the house, they build the place. Casa íntima also follows the trace of a dis-location carried out by other hands, this time masculine, which execute the actions of demolition, destruction, dismantling, they propitiate the dis-inhabitation, they establish the non-place. They bring the time and gestures of the public and political war to the private, domestic and feminine spheres of this house.
Sol Astrid Giraldo
TECHNICAL DATA
Installation, Video and Sound.
Four simultaneous projections in a square space
Sound: Stereo
14 min
EXHIBITIONS
— VI Biennial of Cuba. Havana, 2000.
— XXXVII National Salon of Artists, Bogota. 1998.
— Regional Hall of Artists. Sabana Station. Bogota. 1997.
