A site-specific spatial & embodied research that centres lived experiences of ‘domastic’ occupation — in which rituals of the house are queered or re-interpreted, domestication becoming ‘domastication’ - a chewing up or mangling of domestic space rather than an adherence to it.
The work Wonderment Domastication is grounded in processes of mapping domesticities and design anthropology. It focuses on the collection of sensitive data about intimate or quotidian domestic routines or rituals, captured in film vignettes. The vignettes articulate temporal moments of domastic occupation — situations that destabilize notions of regular spatial arrangement or normative use, whether through the conditions of the space itself or through the manner of occupancy (vice versa).
Spatial information is re-traced into a scaled scenography. The vignettes are deconstructed through techniques of site writing, thick description and movement analysis — which slows down or stretches body-space dynamics to focus on behaviour in context. Such processes re-formulate the vignettes through narrative and performance — which functions here as a research tool and a lens through which to encounter the domestic.
Thinking about domestic space as scenography and movements and behaviour as choreography. This performative research draws our attention to the ways in which bodily practices produce meaning and have the power to reveal the active, social construction of domestic reality.
Wonderment Domastication becomes a site of convergence that entangles embodied, material and conceptual moments of disorientation and dis-identification together to reveal the reflexive relationships between identity and the space one inhabits.
NRC Woongroep | Joeri Bosma, George Mazari, Mylou Oord, Giuliana Dieni, Christine Cormier & Sadie Temple
Sky Palace | Carly (Charmy) Rose Bedford
The Villa | Lucas Muñoz Muñoz
The term Domastication is coined by French poet, Caroline Bergvall in the text Éclat — an extract here:
2. Call that a living ro o m ? THIS. Is a living room. A front room.
Owdooyoodoo. Owdooyoodoo. To cross into a rm of ths kind that
we may c a rry & conduct ourslves as if originating from resolved
gender and normal art. Accurate, precise, seamlessly, welladjusted.
You’ve crossed into the. High ceiling open fire. Name the
objects arranged and negotiated.
Wo n d e rment domastication, don’t you find.
Ndeed.
Biscuit.
Thankyou ta.
Or make us each more certain “I’m not my own unshapely”. No big
wet thing.
What big wet thing. You mean this?
Caroline Bergvall, Éclat SITES 1-10 (Ubu Editions, 1997), p.13