This morning Claudia sent me an email asking me to post the following message as a “reply” to Yasmine’s post “Is Home a spatial matter?” (Funny as I had mentioned Claudia’s work in my comment to Yasmine’s post).” To follow up on Yasmine’s question “Is home a spatial matter?”, here is part of my exploration of a related question “What is home?”.The question “What is home?” inspires today very different reactions, than it did only 20 years ago. Transience has driven us to loose the sense of place. In that process, we have gained a sense of us. Today, ‘Home’ is an inner-self construction that we carry wherever we go. It is a collection of memories, values, assumptions, priorities and invisible qualities we keep in us. Today, Home is us.“What is home?” is a series of landscape photographs where the horizon is playing the primary role. These images were exhibited at Luis Serpa Gallery in Lisbon, for the occasion of “The Ulysses Fascination” Group Exhibition in May 2008.In each image is quoted a sentence. Some of these sentences are from answers I got to the question ‘what is home?’ This question was sent to a list of people by email…Above are 3 photographs with 3 quotes (more on my blog):1…. and we lose something, don’t we? When we are not able to say “this is where I’m from”. We lose not only a sense of place but a sense of identity. (Pico Iyer)2. HOME is a myth. HOMEish is a more realistic concept, is a place that almost feel like home but there is always someone or something that is missing (Ana Foseca)3. Home is what we are running from: what we are dreaming of. What we try to avoid because we’re dreaming of freedom: what we try to build because we need roots (AL Fayard)ByeClaudia

 Contemporary artists question our perceptions of affordances, interrogating the functions of objects and the meaning of situations. One might think of the extreme questions by surrealists’ works such as  Marcel Duchamp’s fountain or Rene Magritte’s “This is not a pipe”. A similar questioning is at the core of Claudia’s work on chairs: what is a chair? Is a chair an object that affords sitting? Then what does it  becomes when you hang it from the ceiling, when you put it on stilts and take a way the sitting part, or when you make a cascade of  chairs? http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/34724.html  I also interpret Sophie Calle’s Prenez soin de Vous as an exploration of the “affordance” of the phrase “take care of yourself” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.artWhat does this phrase afford to Sophie Calle? She does not know. She does not know how to interpret it and thus she asks 107 women to interpret it for her - to tell her what they read, what they understand, what they feel. Does this phrase affords “support”, “caring”, “affection”? For the author of the words, if you take the literal meaning it does, for all these interpreters it does not.Yet this might show the difference between texts and artifacts: artifacts afford in the sense that they suggest and/ or limit actions; affordances are not infinite. Text can be endlessly interpreted and in some ways there are no limits.Then you’d tell me does it make sense to talk about the affordances enacted through discourse? I guess it does as here we are not looking at the content per se, at its interpretation, but at the discursive practices and how they help creating a sense of space that trigger some type of interactions and allow the building of a sense of shared identity. As you can see, I am exploring here. Any thoughts and comments are welcome. Thanks. al  

I would like to follow up on Aileen’s post on art and research. I’d like to discuss the possible dialogue between art and social sciences with a specific example. I became aware of the possibility of such a dialogue during my discussions with my artist friend, Claudia Conduto. At that time, we were both in Singapore and she was starting doing installation works, more specifically using chairs (for some pictures, see http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/34724.html ).

As she was telling me about her work and her aim to question the functionalities of objects, I could not help thinking of Gibson and the concept of affordances. I told Claudia about affordances and lent her Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. She gave it back to me a few weeks later, very excited about the possibility to theorize in a different way about her work.

More recently, as I was visiting Claudia in Brussels, she told me about some of her work on technical objects and their agency. Immediately I thought of actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour, and human and non-human agents. What Claudia was telling me specifically reminded me Bruno Latour’s text on the door opener (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/050.html ). Claudia smiled and went in one of her folders and picked up Bruno’s article! 

These two instances are two lovely proofs of how art and social sciences (in a broad sense) can interact. Yet, in these two examples, it was the social sciences discourse offering a theoretical framework to the arts: putting words around the work; aiming to verbalize and theorize the meaning of the art work.

In this current project with Aileen, the approach is reverse: can art as a language provides social sciences a way to embody, materialize ideas from the social sciences’ realm? An attempt in that direction can be seen in the exhibitions organized by Bruno Latour http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/index.html.

Moreover, can we create an environment where one can scaffold her ideas and then reintroduce them in the social sciences’ discourse - i.e. maybe writing an academic article, at least providing new theoretical insights on the relationship between physical and virtual space and their impact on interactions and discursive practices? 

Any thoughts are welcome. 

al

Recent work by Claudia Conduto, The Space In-Between (http://claudiaconduto.blogspot.com/), explores the notion of space and how it is changed by transformations in our ways of living and by the fact that we are increasingly more global. Claudia is questioning the notion of “home” as the “place where we live”, the “place where we belong”. Her focus is on our perception of space, the emotions related to it as we feel we belong or not…   While there is always a sky above our head, how similar, how different is the sky while we are in Brussels, Singapore, Lisbon, or New York? al