Mutant Bodies of Architecture.

“The Domestic Project” exhibition at Milan Triennale (1986)

 

Gaia Piccarolo

Politecnico di Milano​

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The pandemic has contributed to blur the boundaries between private and public, home and work, paving the way for new forms of leisure to enter the domestic space, and ultimately questioning the ways in which our bodies traditionally inhabit the home. In contrast to the long-lasting conception of the home as the place devoted to intimacy and privacy, the pandemic effects have accelerated the transition to a post-domestic scenario, definitively breaking with a codification of the domestic sphere than span from the 18th to the 20th century.

 

The exhibition “The Domestic Project”, curated by Georges Teyssot at Milan Triennale in 1986, not only acutely examined this codification, but prophetically traced the symptoms of a disruption of the very idea of the home as a “private monad”, with potential massive implications on the notion of the self and the status of subjectivity. Interrogating this exhibition under the lens of “flesh” suggested by this conference, we are therefore mobilizing themes that are today under close scrutiny, such as the relation between the body and technological devices, the dissolution of the classic balance between private and public, and the complex entanglement between forms of freedom and transgression and forms of repression and surveillance.

 

Taken altogether, the almost thirty prototypes displayed at the Palazzo dell’Arte form a rich phenomenology of the different degrees of fusion, interference, or distance, between the body of the inhabitants and the body of the architectonic devices, exploring the zones of ambiguity between private and public, interior and exterior, organic and inorganic, health and decay, space and behaviors, expression and repression. More precisely, each of them seems to configurate a different stage between the two extremes of total incorporation and total disembodiment, subjectification of the home and objectification of the inhabitant.

 

At the same time, they explore different aspects of the vast range of emotions and practices belonging to the sphere of privacy as the opposite to public life: from rest to body care, from erotic pleasure to sport, from leisure and entertainment for our minds and souls, from breaks or recesses to distraction as diversion or divergence, from the capitalist invention of free time to relaxation, from idleness to the potential withdrawal from the world.