KARTONHAUS (INHABITATION PROCEDURE)

‘KartonHaus’ is the inhabitation of an artist Studio and residence in Krems on Donau, Austria. The work took place over 8 week in September and October, 2023.

It comprises the remaking and adjustment of the architecture and spatial pathways of the existing living spaces as a type of ‘temporary architecture’, through building forms, partitions, floor areas, columns and clusters with found and collected cardboard packing boxes (kartons in German).

The ‘kartons’ were collected weekly from used packaging left in the streets by local premises for collection. Boxes are reassembled, taped and repaired and at times reformed. The Kartonhaus packaging boxes are then recycled.

The rooms in the apartment are subject to inhabitation procedures over time, involving working around everyday living routines, intervening into furniture and surfaces, research, drawing, archiving and documenting.

The project enquires into relations between sculpture practice, adjustments of space by inhabitants of dwellings and the siting of artworks as installation and intervention. It examines how acts of dwelling and making correspond as habitation procedures; as everyday processes of amending space and objects. Understood as a female will-to-identity they suggest new ways of constructing the experience of encountered sculpture and the passage of the domestic into public discourse.

Through the work I consider questions like how can sculpture practice gain knowledge about a site and its inhabitants? How do spatial adjustments by inhabitants in dwelling sites and sculptural practice correspond? What expression of the domestic in public discourse can be encountered through sculpture practices?