Pracownia Działań Przestrzennych
Studio of Spatial Activities

15.06.2015

The title of my diploma work „On the First Floor on the Right There is No One" was drawn from a book by George Perec “Life: a User’s Manual”. The author presents the life of inhabitants of one of the tenements in Paris, focusing on both his heroes, and interiors. The introduction to this, presented in the world of detail, is a description of a certain painting, in which the painter, Serge Valene “would paint (...) a tenement that he lived in for fifty years. There would be no facade, only a breakdown of the rooms hiding behind it, the staircase with the elevator, stairs, and doors leading to apartments. And, just like in houses for dolls, where every object is a miniature – carpets, sketches, clocks, hot-water bags – in each interior, there would be people living there in the past, and those who are still there. And all elements of their lives – their cats, kettles, adventures...”.

This literary vision turned out to be very close to the concept of my work, which appeared before I came across the book by Perec. Thus, I treat it, not as an inspiration, but only a confirmation of my intuition and vision connected with this idea of a home, which comprises not only the architectural form, but everything that fills it.

The work „On the First Floor on the Right There is No One” becomes a model of a home, which, unlike the tenement from the book by Perec, does not have inhabitants. It consists of three big video projections, located in the space and pointed at walls in large scale. Each screening is based on an identical basis: there are pictures of empty, used shelves of different proportions, shades and destination. The camera, moving slowly along or inside their interiors, silently registers each detail, in which the history of the location is written. We have the possibility to see them in a classic perspective, which involves a completely objective view. The film becomes a record of “inventory” of empty spaces, deprived of any emotional involvement.

Lack of point of reference makes the interiors lose their scale. They stop being domestic shelves, used for storing different objects, and become abandoned architectural spaces, in which the one and only “current” element is light coming inside.

Empty spaces of shelves, like empty apartments, always indicate the transitional stage between what happened, and what is about to happen, between the entrance and exit, between clearing out and filling up again. Emptiness is always unnatural for them. Shelves, just like interiors, are to be filled – with objects, or life. When we are in an empty apartment, or look into empty wardrobes and cavities, we start to notice and read all traces, which were hidden or insignificant. In the empty space, everything intensifies, gains meaning and starts talking. Traces indicate the absence, evanescence, lack, and emptiness.

The video installation is completed by a single physical object – an old motorbike helmet, which I found by accident, and which opens a completely new context to my paper. Through its used texture and faded color, it resembles a part of a skull rather than a piece of motorcycling headgear. This association causes a thought; that the helmet may also be an empty space, separating the interior from the outside world, in which the body – the head – was hidden. Put in slow rotation, it may resemble a mysterious, cosmic object, which sets in motion the architectural construction appearing in the film. Thus, one of the basic antinomies appearing that way: body – home, home – body is a point that joins the three videos together, between which there is a space for our visions of home, which are incorporated in our memory and senses. This confirms the thesis that “home” is always in us and that we can call it back to life from our memories and impressions. As Gaston Bachelard once wrote “What would be the point of all those paintings, if they were not of dual meaning? They live in a point, in which home and body become one.”