Surface Tension_Curitiba
Home Rec.
In approaching an exhibition related to questions of place and the specifics of Curitiba as an environment, we were led to the space of the Home. This came about by recognizing that Ybakatu as a gallery is in fact a home: situated on a residential street, the gallery was initially occupied by the Nissel family beginning in 1973, before being converted to a gallery by Tuca Nissel in 1995. To work in the gallery for us then became about occupying a home. To explore this situation, we set about researching and investigating the history of the house, speaking with the Nissel family, and bringing this history forward through re-building, or re-imagining the home as it was before being a gallery: to draw the past of the place. Further, the theme of Home led us to request audio recordings by local residents of Curitiba capturing their home environment: sounds of appliances, family voices, the creak and shadows of hidden acoustics. We wanted to collect the Home as it exists throughout the city. This was extended into an open call for audio recordings from people around the globe. These recordings appear through the installation, as murmurings and audible signs of the living space of Home, as an infrastructure of inhabitation and spaces of personalized practices: recordings of cooking and cleaning, holding conversations, watching TV or listening to radio, or both at the same time, all form variations on the forms of ‘being at home’ as a cultivated gesture.
