THE MODEL HOUSE

Installation, 2023

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Distinguishing between "domestic" - related to the home - and "domesticated" - from " domesticate," meaning to reduce, adapt, make tractable - is an exercise that reveals the distance between the familiar and intimate and the extractive control of the social body.

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The same Latin root "domus" refers to a specific space: the house. Reflection on the connotation between the private and the public, 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 perspective of class and gender. Three virtual spaces that recreate the origin, problems, and desires of the common imaginary of working-class homes through immersive digital images.

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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 1851 Universal Exhibition, rationally uniform, hygienic, and moral, which would define the new family unit that would support the basis of the capitalist system through the division and use of spaces. These houses were a tool for the control of the working classes: housing units that normalized who occupied what place, with men in the factories and women, silently, at home, leaving behind the use of communal structures. Following this design, various types of working-class housing were defined and built throughout the 20th century in industrial areas and development centers, such as Bizkaia. Houses that were once occupied by the workers of these now-dismantled industries, which continue to be inherited and rescued residences, in this case, through family narratives.

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In the second and third immersive spaces, the artist takes up the aesthetic and functional projection work of 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 we imagine, on the other. The lines of Roberts' house, the one that is endured and the one that is idealized, intersect and overlap, revealing how culturally ingrained its not-so-innocent origin is.

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Tana Garrido's research confirms the persistence of these models of socio-economic control systems in our society. But it also embarks on the speculation of 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?

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Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo