FRAY FOAM HOME Bienal de Venecia

Homes are arenas in which the political currently finds opportunities to happen. FRAY FOAM HOME is the restitution of the fragmented spaces in which a specific home -with its comforts, supplies and fictions- is constructed. Sweet Homes are no longer apolitical spaces for familiarity, but distant-bubbled-made-foams joined by conflict and fray. Distribution and uses of water, energy exploitation, right for access to fiction, engagement with transgendered individual roles are the arenas in which societies get shaped. What does this home look like? That is what FRAY FOAM HOME aims to approach.

FRAY FOAM HOME
By Andrés Jaque

Even the most intimate and personal action happens in shared multiple locations. Washing our skin activates shared contracts with water and infrastructures. Lotions to prevent its aging make our skin to inhabit labs where they get tried on mice. We are bubbled-foam-homes dwellers. There are no agoras any more, but an atmosphere of collective controversies in which we get to take decisions. We no longer go out to emerge as citizens. There is not outside and inside. By committing ourselves with energy efficient or unsustainable expenditure is how we install ourselves both individually and as collectives as components of the public. We live in ‘Parliament Homes’ ruled by confrontation, but we remain mainly blind to it.

FRAY FOAM HOME comes from the detailed study of the dependencies and polemics in which a specific flat in Madrid’s Calle del Pez happen. A flat shared by five people with personal daily options. The installation is an approach to the restitution of the distant contextual fragments and public polemics in which their daily lifes are installed. What gets visible, gets critical and accountable. What are the politics of design emerging from opening the black box of expanded multi-located homes? That is the question architecture can build up. A local interior design for global occupancies, which could be detailed in three questions:

1. What if consumption locations and productive ones could be experienced simultaneously? Could we produce a notion of relational beauty, closer to ‘parliaments’ than to ‘white boxes’?

2. What if we try to build with resilience and redundancy rather than with zoning and spatial specialization? Could a sensitivity for forecasting and optimizing be replaced by one of risk management and adaptability?

3. What if conflict could be politically managed? Could the management of difference and controversies be taken to daily life? Could we transform the material architectural devices that mediate in our social installation to move from a territorial antagonism to a foam-like agonism?

Architecture is often the device to promote territorial distribution in order to ensure realms of ‘Sweet Local Calm’. But it can also be a time for architectures of daily realities becoming compulsory pass points for the polemics in which they are constructed.