with Ignacio G. Galán, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, and Marina Otero Verzier (After Belonging Agency)
Commissioned by the Oslo Architecture Triennale
With a stranger sleeping on your couch; inside the boxes at the storage facility; surrounded by the information you share in the cloud; after clearing customs at the airport; where your passport allows you to reside. Being at home entails different definitions nowadays, both within domestic settings and in the spaces defined by national boundaries under contemporary regimes of circulation.
The 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale designs the objects, spaces, and territories for a transforming condition of belonging. Global circulation of people, information, and goods has destabilized what we understand by residence, questioning spatial permanence, property, and identity—a crisis of belonging. Circulation brings greater accessibility to ever—new commodities and further geographies. But, simultaneously, it promotes growing inequalities for large groups, kept in precarious transit. After Belonging examines both our attachment to places and collectivities—Where do we belong? —as well as our relation to the objects we own, share, and exchange—How do we manage our belongings?
After Belonging consisted in six main platforms: Two exhibitions—On Residence (DogA), and In Residence (Norwegian National Museum–Architecture), an International Conference, a Publication, the Academy, and the Embassy.
Duty-Free Shop at Oslo Airport Gardermoen. Photograph by Ryszard Parys, 2014. Courtesy of the author.
Photograph by Mathis Herbert, 2009. Courtesy of the author.
Manhattan Mini-Storage building in New York City,
Photograph by Brett Beyer, 2015. Courtesy of the author.
“Moments of Freedom,” Asylum Seeker’s Center in Oslo. Photograph by Javad Parsa, 2013. Courtesy of the author.
American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery Hospital. Photograph by Paul Macleod, 2015, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Courtesy of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery Hospital.
The Redeemed Christian Church of God annual convention campground near Mowe, on the outskirts of Lagos.
Photograph by Robin Hammond, ca. 2013. Courtesy of Robin Hammond and National Geographic.
Digital Platform, 2015. Courtesy of Airbnb.
House built with remittances in El Salvador. Photograph by Andrés Asturias, 2010.
“Restructuring Swedish Modernist Housing,” Million Housing Apartment in Tensta. Photograph by Matti Östling, 2012. Courtesy of the author.
On Residence Exhibition at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture (Doga). Video by Istan Virag.
After Belonging: On Residence documents the spatial conditions that shape our ways of staying in transit and the redefinition of our contemporary spaces of residence, considering the aesthetic, technical, and sociopolitical implications of this redefinition. The contributions to the exhibition gravitate around five areas: Borders Elsewhere, Furnishing After Belonging, Sheltering Temporariness, Technologies for a Life in Transit, and Markets and Territories of the Global Home.
The design reflects upon the logics and forms of organization of contemporary storage spaces, a dense and floating maze where unexpected encounters between objects, evidences and speculations occur.
On Residence Exhibition, DogA.
All photos in these series by Miguel Fernández-Galliano.
After Belonging Hypermap
Drawing by David Jiménez Iniesta, Maria Ángeles Peñalver Izaguirre, and Studio Animal (Javier Jiménez Iniesta).
Exhibition In-Progress
Eduardo Tazón with After Belonging.
In Residence Exhibition at the National Museum of Architecture, Oslo. Video by Istan Virag.
After Belonging: In Residence is a speculative platform focused on a selection of ten sites around the globe that encapsulate current transformations of belonging. The exhibition presents ten commissioned reports and five intervention strategies—intended as two distinct and related architectural operations to approach those sites. In addition, five intervention strategies have been selected for the sites located in Oslo and the Nordic region, through an international open call.
The exhibition design simultaneously encloses and bridges, and privileges visual encounters between spaces. It blurs traditional limits between territories, thus undermining the idea of site as defined by national boundaries and challenging the political nature of the very site it occupies: The National Museum-Architecture.
All images in this series: In Residence Exhibition, National Museum of Architecture. Photos by Miguel Fernández-Galliano.
Eduardo Tazón with After Belonging.