Casa-

território

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Território-

casa

One house differs little from another,

what is important to know is

whether the house is built in Hell or in Heaven.

Jorge L. Borges

The result of a collective curatorial process involving undergraduate and graduate students from UNICAMP and external researchers, the exhibition "House-territory /// Territory-house" brings together the work of 10 visual artists from 6 different nationalities, all participants of project Rede ArteRefúgio. This initiative is promoted by PROEEC-UNICAMP (through the PEX call for proposals) and carried out by the Cátedra Sérgio Vieira de Mello ACNUR/UNICAMP and the research group CINERE.

Taking the notion of home as its starting point, the exhibition presents a selection of works by this diverse group of artists, reflecting on the personal and collective dimensions of the experience of dwelling.

As our "first universe"—"a cosmos in every sense of the term," in the words of Bachelard—the house stands as the quintessential image of a protective space, the "non-self that protects the self." Yet this universe cannot exist in isolation—in the philosophical view of Antônio Bispo dos Santos, for instance, "the house is made by the location of the land, the placement of doors and windows, and the position of the moon." The protective universe of the house is always constituted in relation to an entire world that exceeds it. It positions us, as Bispo dos Santos further notes, "within a cosmological relationship."

What, however, can be done when this comforting image is unable to take shape? When geographical, political, and economic systems prevent the realization of this "ideal home"? Or when the very constitution of this home reproduces the forms of violence inherent in those systems?

The artists featured in the exhibition “House-territory // Territory-house” confront us with these questions through works in various mediums—including painting, collage, photography, video, and installation—that complicate notions of belonging, identity, and memory. Their creations lay bare the enduring legacies of colonialism in both material and symbolic regimes; the violence of contemporary border policies; the racial ordering of urban and domestic spaces; and the consequences of humanity’s exploitative relationship with the ecosystem.

However, their practices are not limited to a deconstructive gesture. Beyond that, they emerge as critical-poetic interventions, inviting us to imagine alternative futures—and pasts.

In a constant flow between interior and exterior, between the personal and the collective, these artists reconstitute the home as a point of inflection from which it is possible to unearth the political structures that shape the surrounding world and to propose new, more sensitive configurations between the house and the territory.

– João Felipe R. Ferreira, Curatorial Director.