Abstract
In the summer of 2020, a group of twelve architects spent one week of artistic residency locked inside of a ruined House built on a small island in the Venetian lagoon: one per room, in complete solitude.
The House was an almost exact replica of what was previously thought to be an unrealised project by John Hejduk: his House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate. Built in the 70’s by an eccentric Contessa, without Hejduk’s knowledge, the House was on its way of being demolished by the new owners. Their plan was to build a luxury glamping resort in its stead. The Unfolding Pavilion made an agreement with them, by signing a contract that allowed the temporary occupation of the House and the realisation of twelve site-specific installations inside of its rooms, on the condition that everything was to be kept secret before the demolition of the building took place. Everything went accordingly and sadly, in December 2020, the House was razed to the ground.
The incredible story of the replica of John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate is the subject of Rituals of Solitude, a transmedial exhibition in three acts curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando, on the occasion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Conceived in the middle of the global lockdown, Rituals of Solitude is an expanding exhibition about the inversion of the traditional relationship between private and public space; about the paradoxical rituals by means of which homes are inhabited; about the ways in which visual technologies are domesticated and used as tools for self-representation and bonding; about the accumulation, fetishization and exhibition of objects in domestic interiors; and about the conditions of solitude that are generated by forced acts of isolation.