TRACES

November 2012 

We do not rent, squat or own our house; we guard it until it gets demolished. We inhabit a structure of brick, wood and glass that is in transition.

At the end of the transition, when we will be forced to move out, we will remember the house. The house built on a flood area, the ‘social’ house looking out over the villa, the house full of mosquitos, spiders and flies. The house with fungus in the bathroom, a shower sink without enamel, with holes in the bedroom ceiling, bleu skirting at the children’s bedrooms, burning marks on the window-still of the toilet, holes and hooks in the living room walls and ceiling, colorful drawingson the radiator and the doors and a worn out wooden floor in the living room.

The characteristics of our home, a built structure full of life and traces, bears the marks of all its previous tenants. Among these marks we practice dwelling. Not on blank modernist piece of paper but in a book full of stories. We dwell between the lines and add new chapters to the story of the house, of which we will take out some them before it gets demolished and forgotten.

 

Mark Proosten