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24/9/2010

The House of Leaves

Caochangdi Village, Beijing

“In fact, it all starts with a leak.”
“Make room. Look out the window. Look onto the street. Space out. Watch a building be. Take time to eat your lunch. Take up time. Get a haircut. Take your time. Massage your soul. Sleep. Dream something up. Revel in this mood. Get lost in the empire of atmosphere. As in the unconscious, some- thing always happens when nothing does.”
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy – Architecture and the Visual Arts

Somewhere between those lines gapes the brilliance of a poetic image. An image of intimacy attached to a serendipitous architecture of non-action, reflection, suspendedness.
Gaston Bachelard called this 'felicitous space': the houses of men and things that seized upon by the imagination pave the way for the unimaginable. In his Poetics of Space, the house is not simply a metaphor of containment; it makes room for a phenomenology of the hidden, the illogical and the reverie, it endows the function of inhabiting with the irrational, somehow solipsistic, purpose of constructing. The house as an intimate image is ultimately an impossible space. It is a reeling archive of processes that keeps on changing and being drawn towards the irrationality of depths and new beginnings, deprived, as it becomes, of the certainty of relative topography. In intimate spaces things are imagined and set in motion in timeless interiors, they are stratched between memory and anticipation, between the idlesse of thoughts and the intentionality of objects, bound to the dual function of reality and unreality.

So of change and new beginnings. Or of meaningful in-betweenness.

We move back to where we were. Things have changed, the village has changed. It has gone from 场[chǎng, cháng] – an open field, a generic space, a place of gathering, to 厂 [chǎng] – a workshop, a factory, a place of productive purpose. At least, the new signage off the 5th ring road says so. Caochangdi, once dark and subterranean, is now well lit and architecturally sound.

Again, somewhere between those two signs dwells an image of poetic comfort, an emotional retreat. On a side the open-endedness and idleness of freeplay - that primordial function of inhabiting that separates us from both the past and reality, where things and time can be squandered, undone, dissipated; on the other, a site of function, a place of scheduled objectivity and self-awareness.

The House of Leaves sits amidst said confines. It takes its name from the genre-defining novel written by Mark Z. Danielewski. A typographically labyrinthine book tiered through multiple narrators and triggered by continuous détournements of filmic narratives, it is designed in an architecture of knowledge that both defines and defies itself. The book is a house, about a movie of a house, whose interior changes unexpectedly further and deeper than its exterior. As it's been observed, it is impossbile to read the House of Leaves the same way twice. It is meant to be an impossible space – and it should be explored like one. What constitutes and builds throughout the act of reading is ultimately a private space of imaginific derangement where multiple cross-references leak from phrases to extruded paragraphs and page-long footnotes – the actual house arises from within the fractures of its building process.

Seemingly this House of Leaves appears as an architectural analogue of what we have set our practice to be ever since we founded BAO Atelier in 2006.
BAO is a syllable used in the transliteration of the Bauhaus (Bao-hao-si 包豪斯) and begins the nomenclature of the Baojian (包间) a semi-private/semi-public room in a restaurant used to host informal gatherings at which discursive progress is being made in the local context.
BAO Atelier is a radically collaborative venture that integrates curatorial, editorial and design production into an open-ended environment of research and experimentation that looks at the contemporary through the prism of artistic creation and its multidisciplinary extensions.

The House of Leaves wishes to accommodate us, like-minded people and ideas in a moment of confortable adrift motion, purposeless but to that incipient passage that turns thoughts and irrational images into concrete ideas and objects.
From 场 [chǎng, cháng] to 厂 [chǎng], somewhere in-between.

The House of Leaves is a three-storey red-brick building that comprises a private (or semi) apartment on its top floor, a working station on the second floor and a large public living room.
We are opening the house to our friends on September 25th at 5PM in Caochangdi – we keep on roaming and perambulating within and without geographical and non- confines, yet we have finally made it to make space for others too.
You will excuse the rhetoric of naming and entitling, yet again, we provide an image, we draw the link, you can fill it too.

Our first happening “Interior with A Geographer (or How we look at Intimate Places)” pays tribute to the philosopher of unattended spaces Gaston Bachelard and his disarming poetics of the human soul. It travels back four centuries to a portrait by Jan Vermeer (1669) where nothing we see but a man sitting in his studio. Yet the room, as Derek Gregory suggests, does more than containing: it “becomes the site where an orderly projection of the world is made available for inspection by the mind”.

Back again, it is 2010. Projections of the world, real and fictive, certainly abound; even more swiftly we travel through them, forgetting how we see and from where we look.

The House of Leaves has been designed and furbished by Li Naihan to 'house' points of view, positions that can shift but never lose their sense of standing, belonging to the 'somewhere', 'someone' or 'something'.
Walking through the rooms you'll find mementos: drawers, nests, knots and chests, sofas and lights, cellar and attic, real and imagined corners, space to idle and space to sleep, think, write, read and build.
These 'mobile' simulacra are what surround us, they accommodate and contain the body, the things and moments we carry with it.

Beijing – Caochangdi Village
September 22, 2010

The House of Leaves is a project by BAO Atelier

Designed by Li Naihan / Naihanli&Co

Contacts:
Beatrice Leanza 毕月 curatorial@thebao.com
Li Naihan 李鼐含 design@thebao.com

September 25, 2010 h 5pm

Caochangdi Village
Red Building Complex No.1 (Hong Yi Hao Yuan) - A2
100012 - Chaoyang district Beijing, China

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