Lera Kelemen

The global lockdown of the last couple of years has challenged preexisting notions of privacy and forced individuals to redefine their relationship with personal spaces. This Is My Fortress is a project which investigates the effects of these restrictions on individuals assuming that domestic environments have become spaces of both entrapment and liberation. 

Fuelled by the idea that confinement has a pivotal role in experiencing intimacy, the installation creates a speculative room where materiality and texture determine the symbiotic relationship between individuals and the indoors and outdoors realms.

Describing surface, Giuliana Bruno suggests that ‘this tangible, superficial contact is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy.’

Green Skin / Affective Interstice is an interrogation on the on-going projection of the self on the environment and vice-versa. Highlighting skin, plant tissues or wall textures as active surfaces, the project argues that relationships within the built environment are established through external layers that interact. The various spatial elements cited - arcades, engraved plaster, green lights - symbolise human constructions. The vegetal textures - moss, bark, seeds, fibres - are an attempts to zoom in on the natural world and establish a connection between the micro and macro level.

The video work Texture is Identity developed for the preceding installation, Green Skin / Affective Interstice, has also been presented as part of a solo show at Borderline Art Space, Iași.

The installation brings together a compendium of surfaces and structural elements mapped onto the gallery floor to create a network of pathways. A building can be divided into surface and plan. Le Corbusier claims that the surface is what envelopes the mass and that the task of the architect is to ‘vitalise the surfaces which clothe these masses’. In other words the surface is the epidermal layer, the fabric that conveys the identity of a building, and at the same time the facet through which the living, moving world interacts with constructions.

Arguing that frontiers are abstract notions rather than physical boundaries, the structure creates the premises of a space where inside and outside become relative dimensions. This space invites the audience to reflect on the personal and collective processes that define the private and public spheres and on the way in which people relate to the space of ‘the other’.

The installation reproduces the architectural style of a typical house from the rural area of Banat, Romania, tracing its contour at a 1:1 scale. This abstraction of the shape highlights the house as an archaic document that is slowly disappearing against the backdrop of gentrification and urban development.