Site specific installation of a seven metre see-through fabric, hanging from my bedroom window for passerby to step on.
Visual outcome of my engagement with the book, At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, particularly Irene Cieraad’s chapter Dutch Windows: Female Virtue and Female Vice.
A week long experiment in decontextualizing the curtain, to blur the boundary between public and private.
By exagerating its proportions, the curtain shifts away from being a precise border, a line without a volume, as it touches the ground and claims space.
*the curtain hanging on site,
viewed from the top of the roof
Window symbolism in European art is rooted in Christianity.
A seventeenth-century panegyric on the Virgin Mary illustrates the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin by the symbolism of the divine, male light shining through the clear, female windowpane without breaking it.
(...)
The hymen as the historically vital physical borderline of the woman coincides with the windowpane as the vital societal borderline between public and private space.
Cieraad, Irene, Dutch Windows: Female Virtue and Female Vice in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (1999)
**Bouttats, Gaspar, EMBLEMA SEXTUM, MANENT ILLAESA (1681)
***collage of the curtain as a closed path,
composed of all of its documentation,
collapsing its origin, the window, into public space
composed of all of its documentation,
collapsing its origin, the window, into public space
****
curtain hung from the window and
flowing towards the parking lot,
still from a short clip showcasing the length of the piece
flowing towards the parking lot,
still from a short clip showcasing the length of the piece
*****curtain hung from the window and
stretched on top of the roof,
still from a short clip showcasing the length of the piece
photography & collage
January - February 2023