Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
Martha Rosler’s How Do We Know What Home Looks Like? was more sociological
in spirit, comprising video interviews with residents and statistical
information concerning the inhabitants. Milan- based collective Premiata
Ditta’s Relationship Maps attempted to visualise data derived from questionnaires
handed out to the Unité’s residents, while the German artist Regina
Möller worked with some of the children in the building to create dolls’
houses, an allusion to Le Corbusier’s concept of the apartment as a playful
pedagogical space. Heimo Zobernig converted one of the apartments into a
café, reportedly the most popular installation in the whole show. 15
A smaller group of artists, seemingly at a loss as to what to do in the
building, refl ected on the process of making site- specifi c work. Renée
Green’s Apartment Inhabited by the Artist Prior to the Opening pondered the
problems of being a nomadic artist: viewers could see traces of her daily
living activity and attempts to perform the role of an artist in her notes and
sketches of the landscape. A. Arefi n presented an installation of fi les showing
the correspondence between each of the artists and Yves Aupetitallot,
while Stephan Dillemuth, invited to participate in both ‘Project Unité’ and
‘Sonsbeek 93’, produced documentaries about both shows, screening the
Firminy video at Sonsbeek and vice versa.
As this range of works indicate, ‘Project Unité’ is clearly transitional but
contains a number of projects that shift European exhibition-making into a
more socially conscious framework. Firstly, its location in a partially inhabited
building whose architecture contained the aspiration to functional and
communal living. In this instance, the use of the word ‘project’ rather than
‘exhibition’ in the title seems to imply that the totality of the situation
Renée Green, Apartment Inhabited by the Artist Prior to the Opening, 1993
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