Lataa ilmaiseksi

Both notions were used in the interviews to express an interviewee’s dislike
for homes that are too organised, too polished and too stylistically coherent,
in short, places where it seems impossible to live and relax. A common phrase
was that “the marks of living” should be visible. Consequently, in the everyday
figurative use of words, museums and galleries are places where the marks of
living have been cleaned away, if they were possible to produce in the first
place. Such is not the case with the hotels, galleries and museums that I am
talking about here, those run by the interviewees in their homes. The marks
of living are visible. The point of the type of curating that I am talking about
is not to keep things clean or make impressive statements, but to facilitate
dwelling.
The notion that people are curating their homes is based on the data. Theo’s
house was still under construction when I visited him the first time, and I was
more or less forced to inquire, “What is all this all going to be?” In response,
Theo outlined the principles or guidelines according to which he was building
the house and designing its interior decoration. At some point, I realised that
I could have asked the same question from all of the other households as well,
quite like we sometimes ask of a child who is building something or of an artist
whose work is still in progress: “What are you doing? What is it going to be?”
Artistic practice is not a bad analogy when discussing how a household’s
moral economy is created and maintained in the apartment through putting
interior decoration together. But the notion of creating and curating art is
much more careful and scholastic, which did not quite resonate with what was
told to me during the interviews. No doubt there are households to whom
the apartment is a platform upon which they assemble configurations with a
consciousness that resembles artistic intentions (one gets to see these kinds of
holistic takes in interior decoration magazines), but none of the households in
my sample described appropriation of design with such single-mindedness and
coherence that creating a work of art would require.
Instead, a lot more seemed to be going on: the interviewees’ homes allowed
and were often used for several intentional activities, some of which some had
artistic flavour and some less so. The home can be used for eating, sleeping,
washing, cleaning, socialising, hobbies, working and exercising, to name just
some of the activities that the interviewees pursued in their homes. What is
important is that I know about these activities: the interviewees talked about
them because these activities were connected with design, most often by the
designed product simply facilitating the activity, for example cooking.
To make sense of all these activities, and the huge amount of facilitating
products in the home, I am building an analogy of dwellers acting as the cura-
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