Troubling Domesticities is based on the observation that space plays an active role in maintaining power relations between bodies and subjectivities. Focusing on domestic spaces, it argues that our material environment is not a neutral backdrop accommodating the everyday lives of predefined identities and social interactions, but rather actively participates in shaping them. Through the repetitive experiences of daily life — from the most intimate activities to kinship care and reproductive labor — domestic spaces leave deep and lasting imprints on the bodies that inhabit them, under the constructed and shared idea of normality. This design research class questions the contemporary definition of domestic spaces in the Western world, arguing that their boundaries have been blurred by the evolving forms of both neoliberal productive and reproductive work. It therefore approaches domestic space as a fragmented territory.
The spatial analysis of pre-existing experiences of characters from films selected by students, combined with critical readings of texts from architectural theory and queer, feminist, crip, and decolonial studies, serves as a starting point for students to view architecture as a set of biopolitical techniques that exert control over bodies. By transforming the material conditions of domestic movie scenes, students seek to imagine alternative narratives for our everyday environments — ones that could create, at least in the specific setting of the movie scene, space for non dominant bodies and subjectivities.
This class is part of the JMA program, and takes place at MAIA. Photographs : © HEAD – Genève Sylvain Leurent.