The Invisible: Free the Space! #2

Site specific Installation at Grand Kemang Hotel, and

Virtual reality

In Indonesia Contemporary art and Design 2021

In public housing, design acts as an agency of power. Within disinvested communities and spaces in urban areas, there is a discrepancy between the designed space and the way it is perceived by inhabitants. The universal design of public housing often disregards the communal culture and the inhabitant’s psychological needs. In public housing design a concept of boundaries; the boundaries between private-public, production, and living space has collapsed. On the other hand, the inhabitant’s response creates an informal approach in designs, formed by particular spatial patterns which are practiced collectively across Indonesia. These spatial patterns are constantly changing, extend the physical boundary of space. Space is no longer define by its physicality, rather it a result of events, social perception or consensus. This aspect read as performativity act in architecture – in which a space has been produces to be changes, impermanence, without fixed programs. The domestic realm of public housing, no longer perceives as a physical shelter, but it also reflects the cultural dan identity dynamics upon its inhabitants. 

The pavilion portrays an illusory interior of the public housing. The virtual reality and site-specific installation explore the fluidity of space, creates an impression of doubling space, where boundaries are blurred between real-imagined space and a virtual-physical space. Pavilion site-specifically located on the leisure area of the hotel, as a parasite into the established place. It resonates the actual informal design practices, sprawl and produces within in-between space, among the formal buildings. All furniture, doors, windows are wire-cast to capture a silhouette of a found furniture in interior of both informal settlement /kampung and public housing residence.  Also, in Virtual Reality, the audience will be immersed on the series of ever changing lay out, followed by several video and sound to represent the sensorial quality upon the interior of a public housing.  Followed by the wire mesh installation, the installation trespasses a boundary between the physical and imagined space. The pavilion invites us to imagine the inhabitant’s perceived space upon their new dwellings:  a sense of uncanny, a feeling of displacement into their new home.