This installation is that of two archetypal houses, of simple sketching: one big and one small. The houses in very simple wood structure are covered in fabric – a fabric that results from an ensemble of many clothes stitched together: shirts, t-shirts, trousers, socks, scarfs…

Individual clothing pieces, already used by different people and discarded, acquire a new geography of usage, new combinatory logic, as if a meeting-up of different people, or the moments of one’s personal history came together in one solid and unique object.

To sew, as we know, is a symbolic activity and here the act of sewing different clothing pieces is to collect, to bind, to make sense so that later we can create a possible shelter, with a house for a shelter. The used clothes, deprived of the body, are also anthropological and historically charged (like for instance the unforgettable piles of clothes in Auschwitz), artistically charged (Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager) and economical and ecologically charged (its contemporary weight in industrial pollution, its worrying discardability).

Used clothes deprived of a body remind us always of that body, for its purpose, for its shape: empty clothes are not just clothes; they are clothes-without-the-body, underlying its absence.

The material of this house-assemblage – the fabrics – gives some comfort but it also repels, having been in intimate contact with many bodies, other bodies, different bodies. On the other hand, at the installation site, as we enter the house we return to our condition of naked bodies, with an outward guise.

The house-clothe, house-skin, suggests possibilities of construction resorting to basic available matter, in a materialization – as image-thought, image-of-an-idea – of the solution for the problem of (lack of) housing: a short essay for a doable utopia.

Affective and refined shelter, this house is a metaphoric representation of the possibility of combining everyone (in reference to those people that actually wore the used clothes) and everything (the moments and stories lived and the memories that the clothes inspire). Within the classic dichotomy of History, this house thus erected, with clothes used by different people, is both monument and document – but of an anonymous story.

There are two houses: a big one, for an adult or a small set of adults, and a smaller one, for a child or two children, if they manage to negotiate the space or reach an agreement.

The big house is in the house, thus proving, in its essence, to be redundant: house within a house. But it stands in front of another house, smaller, located outside in the yard, unprotected, but closer to its purpose.

This neighbourhood relationship, this proximity, suggests intimacy in separation: two bodies apart and yet close: geographically, constructively, essentially.

The small house, being set in the external yard, exposed to rain and wind, has been erected through the combination of trench coats and winter coats – ideal solution through the transposition of the matter house to the matter clothe, from the tectonic to the textile. The choice of placing the smaller, more fragile, house outside enhances the vulnerability to which whoever lives, homeless, in a public space, is exposed.

In both houses the light source is a simple, improvised lamp suspended from the ceiling. The same thick cable brings electricity to both houses, mirroring economical resourceful situations, as when one pulls electricity from a neighbour or from the street lamp. Visually – spatially – both houses are united by the cable and by an energy flux, an electric one.

Two archetypal houses, of different dimensions but close in scale, separated by a glass, one indoors, the other outdoors, but together in their isolation, and originality, calling upon reflections on isolation and fusion.