CCE, Miami, presents “Memories of the Oikos (The House Re-Presented)”

The human need for shelter gave rise to the first of the arts, house architecture, which as Walter Benjamin wrote in Illuminations, “has never been idle.” “Its history is longer than that of any other art, and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to account for the relationship of the masses to the work of art.”

From cave-dwellings to modern apartments, the house, as archetype, is the primordial refuge of the body, the skin that envelops the ego, the place that contains the myth of return. And still, contrary to what happens with other arts, which demand an attitude of visual contemplation, we take possession of houses based on habit, with a certain perceptive indifference which Benjamin also understood. Memorias del Oikos, (la casa re-presentada)/ Memories of the Oikos (The House Re-presented), relocates this archetypal living space to the territory of art. It assumes the representation of the house as a means to inquire into the implications of its representation by also explores aesthetic strategies that challenge the boundaries between the public and private spheres, and the ways in which the “home one carries on one’s back” may have different representations in the feminine and masculine imaginaries.

The term oikos (οἶκος) has its source in the ancient Greek world, where it was the equivalent of a household, house or family, and it was associated with the earliest settlements. But with time, it gave rise to the prefix in words such as ecology and economy, aspects which refer both to the environment and to this era which we assume is sedentary but which is crossed by ceaseless migratory currents, whether voluntary or forced, and often of a political nature or linked to work.

Memorias del oikos… thus gathers together an ensemble of works that ichnographically and/or conceptually incorporate the theme of the house on the basis of concepts linked to memory and displacement, as well as to transculturation, since the distance from the origin also involves a process of identity reinvention. Likewise, parallel to the impossibility to return − since the person that returns has changed − there are also multiple ways to fabricate a dwelling, re-appropriating a territory from the imaginary. Beyond nostalgia, there is a poetics of the house to which one returns via art. Then, a visual aesthetic awareness that differs from the usual relationship one has with the habitat fosters a resurgence of the house with its space possessed as refuge.

The exhibition gathers together photographs by the Argentineans Pablo Soria and Marina Font, the Venezuelan Amalia Caputo, and the Cubans Rogelio López Marín “Gory” and Liliam Domínguez; sculptures and installations by the Cuban Rubén Torres Llorca, and paintings and three-dimensional works by the Colombian José Pacheco, as well as a project featuring printed material by the New-York-based Colombian artist Gean Moreno and the Cuban Ernesto Oroza, which contains design patterns found in popular sectors in Santo Domingo. There people extend the private domain of the house to the public space of the sidewalk, whether by building a tiled path or, if they have no resources, carving geometric shapes in the wet cement as a cunning form of aesthetic possession that reflects the shrewdness of appropriating the space without needing a capital. The multiple processes used to re-invent the house or the appropriation of other aesthetic parameters to reconstruct the notion of shelter generate artistic processes that reflect forms of relationship with the environment and may well encompass a wide range of variants, from a poetics of privacy to a playfulness that puts imagination before economic limitations.

The works of Rubén Torres Llorca inquire into the fissures of everyday life, blurring the boundaries between private and public and recreating the atmosphere of uncertainty present in an oeuvre that raises the question that there is no shelter, no roof allowing contemporary man to dream, in any of the current systems.

Parallel to this, perhaps as a thread of continuity dating back to Ancient Greece, where men could live and wander both in the polis and in the oikos, but the presence of women was restricted to the latter space, it is possible to observe in the exhibit the way in which the reflection on gender runs through the re-presentation of the house from the Diaspora.

The refuge-nest supported by the feminine strength that hauls the weight of a thread (sometimes a cord) of continuity, supporting the house along the nomadic route towards another place, can be appreciated in undoubtedly feminine works such as those produced by Caputo and Font. The latter, in addition, participates together with the Cuban-American of Hispanic origin, Rhonda Mitrani, and the American Patricia Schnall Gutiérrez, in a performance that shows the interior rites supporting the oikos based on the incessant tasks carried out by women.

In Soria and Domínguez’s photographs, created as a reverie or flooded in water, and in the small paintings with splintered wood or in the installations created by Pacheco, for whom “there is no return”, it is possible to perceive the way in which what Bachelard calls “the principle of the unpretentious refuge” emerges like a dreamlike return to the houses of the origin, with a mixture of beauty and desolation.

Gory uses the Miami houses to recreate an atmosphere that detaches itself from the environment through a poetics of its own and through a melancholic dialogue with the history of art. The color saturation in certain areas of the photographs refers the viewer to a visual field in constant displacement.

The representation or the extension of the imaginary of the house from the alien place where it is now located, or the transposition to the public space of aesthetic gestures as forms of appropriation, configure in any case modes of re-possession of the house which can be viewed when it is situated as object of the gaze in artistic creation and as an instrument for inquiry into the migrant imaginary of Miami, the mirror of an epoch of increasing nomadism.

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CCEM ● 1490 BISCAYNE BLVD ● MIAMI, FL 33132

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[1] Term derived from nostos, homecoming, and from algos, pain.