House-Home
Ten concrete block walls, two plaster walls, one lowered plaster ceiling, two pillars, one beam, nine doors, eleven windows, four air directions, do you feel at home?
The performance House-Home was presented in 2013 as part of the Summer Marathon at the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem. It took place in a space constructed by participants in a course for designing exhibition spaces (instructor: Yuval Rimon, a member of the Zik group). The audience stood on top of a two-meter-high hallway that was constructed along the walls of the room, and viewed the stage from above. The installation included a work inspired by my apartment. Using modeling paste (an extremely thick acrylic paint), I created a template based on the apartment’s floor plan. The template transformed the walls and ceilings into rounded forms, which called to mind primitive construction rather than urban construction. I then filled this template with pink paraffin, so that the spaces of the house became a solid mass. The resulting sculptures were reminiscent of human organs. The stage on which the work was presented was covered with flattened cardboard boxes, and resembled a construction site or an apartment under renovation. The apartment’s original building plan was projected onto the stage. I appeared as a worker, and opened a cardboard box that was placed onstage. Inside it was the template I had created, which contained the paraffin cast. The performance centered on removing the parts of the cast one by one from within the template, and placing each on the corresponding space on the floorplan that was projected onto the stage. At the end of the process, the template was separated from the cast and the spaces on the building plan were infused with the vitality of a living organism.
