Architectural Ethnography from Tokyo: Guidebooks and Projects on Livelihood, Japan Pavilion’s exhibition at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia curated by a team of Momoyo Kaijima, with Laurent Stalder and Yu Iseki will showcase over 40 exhibitors ranging from university design studios, architectural offices to contemporary artistic practices from all over the world from the last twenty years.
My Homes is a series of coloured pencil drawings by Do Ho Suh, conveying his autobiographical introspections on domestic space. The drawings record the 55-year history of Suh’s migration from his birthplace in South Korea to London, depicting the places where the artist lived as chronologically ordered sequences of spaces. Using a corpus that spans photos and plans to “family memories,” each house has been surveyed, dissected, and rearranged into a linear set of individual rooms. Drawn to the same scale in both axonometric and orthographic projections, these spatial aggregates are interconnected horizontally by individual openings, as enfilades, and vertically by the addition of freestanding stairs coloured in red. Each room of My Homes resembles a solid mold shaped from the profiles of the architectural elements that define interior space—from floors and walls to windows and roof beams—yet nevertheless also displays the uncanny potential of immaterial transparency. Colors indicate the confines of the houses with a measured imprecision, transposing the previous dwelling into the next one and thus suggesting an alternative rhythm to the whole sequence, as if the relocations were gradual and nuanced. This composite technique produces a single and continuous space. The drawings of the rooms register ornaments and details, invoking the architectural milieu of each house. Generally, however, the compositions simply float on otherwise blank paper, devoid of a context, and forming an ad-hoc archive of domesticity that keeps track—in either a vertical or horizontal progression—only of personal time. Suh’s method lends itself to an ethnography of contemporary domesticity as experienced by urban inhabitants; it enables the identification of continuities in the necessarily fragmented reality of their nomadic existences; it is a monographic questioning of what it means to be at “home” when this reassuring notion is split between multiple places.