_La Casa Modelo

Installation 2023. Montehermoso Kulturunea Cultural Center

Differentiating between domestic – related to the home – and domesticated – to domesticate: reduce, accustom, make treatable... – is an exercise that reveals the distance between the familiar and intimate and the extractivist control of the social body.

The same Latin root “domus” refers us to a specific space: the house. The reflection on the connotation between the private and the public, between the personal and the standardized, is the starting point for the three environments proposed by Tana Garrido. Three houses, three models, three times, utopian, real and potential in a domesticated, remembered and dreamed domestic space, which in this exhibition are revisited from a contemporary class and gender perspective. Three virtual spaces that recreate the origin, problems and desires of the common imagination of the working class home through immersive digital images.

The first of the experiences created by the artist invites you to explore the model of working-class housing proposed by the British architect Henry Roberts for the Universal Exhibition of 1851, rationally uniform, hygienic and moral, which will be defined through the division and uses of the spaces. the new family cell that will sustain the basis of the capitalist system. These homes were a tool for the control of the popular classes: housing units that normalized what place was occupied by whom, the man in the factories and the woman, silent, at home, leaving behind the uses of community structures. Following this design, various typologies of workers' housing built throughout the 20th century in areas and poles of industrial development, such as Bizkaia, were defined. Houses that were one day occupied by the workers of those industries - currently dismantled -, which continue to be residences inherited and rescued, in this case, through family history.

In the second and third immersion spaces, the artist resumes the work of aesthetic and functional projection of a thought derived from historical, artistic, architectural and social research, to collect testimonies about the real spaces we inhabit, on the one hand, and the ideals that we imagine, on the other. The lines of Roberts' house, the one that is suffered and the one that is idealized, intersect and overlap, revealing how culturally assumed its not-so-innocent origin is.

Tana Garrido's research confirms the permanence of these models of socioeconomic control systems in our society. But she also launches into speculation about a possible future: how to reimagine these spaces to make them habitable again, not from the precepts of productivity but from an updated concept of the collective?

Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

Development of the VR application / Borja Calvo, Yerko Nicolás Muñoz

Texts/ Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

CGI design and animation/ Desiree Quevedo Nieto

Graphic design/ Ángel Polo Torres

Construction processes / Adrián Castaneda

Photographs/ Imanol Sánchez, Stuart MacDonald

Architectural plans / Pablo Lambertos

Sound textures / Iván Blanco

Sound design/ Alberto Carlassare

Screenplay / Pablo Jurado

Print/ Graphics Dosbi