Sopho Tabatadze

 

 

My work, for some time now, is dealing with the theme ‘house’, with what makes a house into a home and how much of it is mental and how much physical. It is about the relation between the human body and the architecture.

Of course once I started working with this theme I had to lose my house in Amsterdam. With that I also lost the feeling with the city and I decided to go for more nomadic way of living and to settle in temporary houses. Home is everywhere where once work is. Home is something one creates by building it constantly. Adding to it, taking care of it, it exists during the process itself.

I visited De Strip, project organized by Jeanne van Heeswijk in Vlaaringen. There was Boimants van Beuningen museum, Mama gallery and 2 working spaces, where the artists could stay for maximum 3 months working period. I could stay and work in one of the studios, but when I saw the flat building above the project space, which had some empty apartments in it (as they are going to renovate the building) I decided to move into one of the empty apartments and try to make it into my home. By doing this I wanted to challenge the question that home can be everywhere.

I only took he basics with me: no furniture, I didn’t paint the walls to my liking, instead I decided to react on the house itself; it’s empty walls, traces of the old tenants, the color, the smell of it and by underlining all these actual and imaginary traces to create something mine. But in reality, after I moved what was there to react on? Some scratches on the walls, the name Jason on one of the doors and yellow. Lot’s of yellow.

De Doorzonwoning
September 2003-September 2004

That’s how I ended up in de Doorzonwoning in Vlaardingen Westwijk. Afterwards I’ve learned (from the inburgerings course book) that ‘de Doorzonwoning’ typical product of the Dutch architecture. It is special with its windows that are placed in the front and the back of the house. These windows have no curtains and nothing stays hidden from the curious passers by.

To question this transparency and how much ones look is actually directed to what tenant wants one to see, I’ve built the tunnel (periscope) trough the house. With one end to the public balcony and other end to the other side of my apartment, one can look through from balcony en will see out on the other end of the house.

If you move in this type of apartment, you immediately know where the living room and where the children’s room is. I built the spaces/rooms in the house on the wheels that can be moved and put for different functions. Some (un functional) spaces are built between the two rooms, preventing the doors form closing, changing the monotone idea about the division and the function of each room.

Every 3 month, together with the new openings of De Strip I would open my doors to public.

Now that the project De Strip is finished, I’ve turned the house into my home, and all the doorzonwoning customs into my own, it’s time to move again.

In the summer month I will continue the Doorzonwoning project by creating a traveling key, which will allow curious people, or people in need to stay there for free for maximum amount of one week time and pass the key to the next person. This will question the idea of private and public, this way one can experience the house the best. One can see the details, experience the sun, move the ‘rooms’, feel the yellow.
This people will be asked to email me about their reactions, what they’ve changed, how did they feel etc.

By this the house will continue to grow, live, being reacted on.

Wallpaper
June 2003

The theme of the wallpaper project is dealing with ‘turning inside out’. It is light brownish and red (factory) printed wallpaper and instead of the usual flower patterns (everything is all right) there are internal organs printed on it. If one takes a closer look, one might see, that something is not as it should be. I remember all these totally wallpapered houses I’ve seen as a child: they should make a very good impression on the guest, and outsider, but I could never help the feeling I always got, that something was hidden behind these covered walls, that with a slight change everything could turn upside down.

There are these buildings in the city that have one interior wall showing outside, old wallpaper patterns and tails from the kitchen of somebody’s home displaced openly to the public, always gave me the sensation of peeping into somebody’s private life.
I found such a building in Rotterdam and changed it by placing my internal pattern wallpaper on it. By showing the work in this location, I question the border between inside and outside, private and public.
The work was received very well, it was mentioned in the magazine Metropolis M as a successful graffiti, the one that becomes so transparent, that disappears in the city look.

Sakhli-Dakhli – House on Wheels
July-August 2003
House on wheels was built during the 2 month stay in Georgia this summer in the framework of project ‘ucxoeli / Foreigner’. For me going back to my birthplace city as a foreigner, with other ‘foreign’ colleagues was a very interesting experience. I knew my work would be the reaction on something that would catch my eyes there, by had not a specific plan till I arrived in Tbilisi.
What I saw there was an immense growth of the market; its territory was for sure twice as big as when I left. The food, the cheep goods were everywhere. People have built amazing amount of handmade stands for their products, one could also meet people with little vendor stands hanging around their necks, turning them into the walking mini markets.
What was amazing also, was to see the deserted market at night, it would turn into a strange, shaky, abstract organism with its handmade shelves and hooks, with its blue see of the sunshade’s. Every day, early morning the market would wake up with all it’s sounds, smells and colors and every night it would change into a silent monster construction, without context.

The work I made was a multi-functional house on wheels, where one could sleep at night and turn it into a vender stand in the morning. The house was mobile and its shelves could open and close. I lived there during the two month, building it up day-by-day, adding only functional parts to it. And when I asked myself for whom the house was I realized I was quite much building it for myself, as I’m myself am a person that carries the house on own shoulders.
After the exhibition was finished I transported my construction and left it at the market place, watching and filming how it broke into pieces, how people took away the parts they needed for improving their own houses on wheels. By doing so my house got it’s own life to continue, dissolved in the real market and I will always be looking for the leftover parts of my house once I’m in that market again.

Papercity
September 2002

By using the likeness of the street lines (white signs painted on the asphalt, lines, dotted lines, crossed lines to forbid the parking etc.) and the same kind of lines used in the paper constructions (often made for children so they can build paper houses) I changed the way we look at the city.

By continuing the white lines from the ground and adding them to the tunnel in Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam I changed the place into a "do-it-yourself paper construction”, as if the city itself was a huge paperhouse.