FOREWORD
Architecture is one of the principal forms of fine arts. It surrounds
man at every step and plays an important role in studying the questions
of not only the history of man's dwelling evolution, his attitude
to nature, his devices to climactic and geographic conditions, but
also gives full idea of customs, belief, spiritual development and
aesthetic thinking of any people and any nationality.
N.
Tsultem, Art Historian
Quoted from Mongolian Architecture
The project ART OF INHABITATION - of which this book is a part - was
initiated by Tiina Mielonen, Saara Hacklin and myself. I first came
to Rotterdam to stay in an artists’ residency in Stichting Kaus
Australis and found Rotterdam a fine and fascinating place to be.
So much so that others I knew back home in Helsinki wanted to come
to Rotterdam, too and so in the end we also wanted to bring some of
Rotterdam with us. This book and the associated exhibition organized
in Galleria Huuto in Helsinki in November 2006, presents a view to
Rotterdam we thought intriguing. All this is, however, only meant
to be the beginning of the project. By making this presentation of
artists and ideas we hope to create a future platform for the project
to develop in diversity of views. The next aim is to produce an exhibition
of these Rotterdam-artists together with a group of Helsinki-based
artists and writers to be presented in Rotterdam. What will follow
simply remains to be seen.
This publication, however, is not an exhibition catalogue for the
exhibition ART OF INHABITATION in Helsinki 2006. It is more like a
notebook of those works, projects and artists that originated the
idea for the project. Conflicting and ambivalent ideas of the urban
and the natural, was what caught my interest both in the works of
the artists whose works I saw and what I then wanted to work with
myself. Where it all began and where the title comes from are one
and the same place and moment in time: visiting a Witte de With exhibition
on the Smithsons (Alison and Peter) called From The House of the Future
to a house of today, I came across the term ‘ art of inhabitation’.
As I remember it, it was in a shabby type written text (from 1956)
about how their House of the Future would have an inside garden, diverse-function-furniture….and
an all-around air of glamour. The Smithsons wanted to address all
the facets of the art of inhabitation. The mismatch of the futuristic
intention of the mid-fifties and the sci-fi comic view to the past
of future thinking kept on twisting in my mind. There seems to me
to be something utopian with all urban (and environmental) planning;
a vision of a better society, a better world. But how to understand
the way we are in the world in the first place? These functions and
parts of every day life, which seem quite meaningless, if not invisible…
How can they be understood and made better? Except in a sci-fi that
will be ridiculous 50 years later?
The purpose of the project and works presented in this book and in
the exhibition, ART OF INHABITATION, is not to criticize existing
solutions of architecture or furniture design or environmental planning,
nor to make suggestions for future ones: the purpose is stirring awareness
about an act – the art of inhabitation – the slow invisible
way in which we settle into our environment and start to belong. This
is not anything we would normally think about, but it may become suddenly
quite visible when moving to a new place. Then, for a moment, it is
possible to perceive everything sharp, clear and detailed. As long
as you don’t know where the nearest supermarket is, the world
is strange and full of surprises. When a flat is just acquired and
empty it is of utmost importance to furnish it with at least a few
objects that will make it a “home”. A few weeks, definitely
a few months later, the few blocks to the supermarket are already
invisible; and even the home has become more or less just as it is.
Familiarity makes us blind to our actual surroundings. Partly this
is of course necessary for the smoothness of living, but every once
in a while it maybe recommendable to notice the chair one sits on,
the escalator that takes one up from the metro tunnel every morning,
the historical background of the pot-plant on the window-sill.
The intention of the ART OF INHABITATION- project is to comment these
themes in general, but with a special emphasis on the multi-layered
ways in which nature (constructed and unintentional) intertwines with
built environment. This because the way we conduct ourselves towards
nature and use nature as commodities (materially or ideally) is most
enlightening about how we in general think of ourselves being in the
world. After all, houses are built and cities planned in order to
keep us safe and comfortable, away from the inconveniences and chaos
of nature, and by the time we feel snug enough in our little nests
of brick and furniture, we invite the nature back in, in different
forms: house-plants and aquaria are the forests and seas of the world,
gardens and parks just the appropriate amount of nature convenient
and necessary. And still nature is not really something separate from
either human or urban: it can be used as a marker of difference, but
it is always there. Opposite to the rather common idea of nature as
a normative good, I think it more constructive to work with the idea
of nature as an all-covering base of things. What maybe once were
a flowing river and a sparkling fire are now indoor plumbing and central
heating, but it is nature all the same. Or, to say it more concisely
as geographer David Harvey does somewhere: There is nothing unnatural
about New York City , and so definitely not about Rotterdam.
Annu Wilenius
June 25th 2006, Helsinki, Finland
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