Amsterdam , 1995

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE

Interview with 10 people about their internal architecture, video, drawings, model in wax. 

Collection: Bacob Bank, Belgium

Interior Architecture was an investigation of our ‘interior house’: our mental world that, with its many ‘rooms’, forms our lived experience. Rooms full of encounters and desires that determine the structure of our ‘I’. Alicia’s research began with a series of interviews with different people. To make communication with her interviewees easier, she made a scale model of wax that consisted of a number of empty rooms in which they could organize their personal mental spaces. The model was soaked in Vaseline to make it more tactile. During the conversations her guests all started touching the empty spaces of the model. Their memories opened up and dialogue could begin: they started talking about the rooms they had lived in and the rooms they would like to live in. Each person gave different names to the rooms and related different experiences to them, while using the same model. There were also spaces to which they all reacted the same. Alicia calls these rooms universal.

Interior Architecture was an investigation of our ‘interior house’: our mental world that, with its many ‘rooms’, forms our lived experience. Rooms full of encounters and desires that determine the structure of our ‘I’. Alicia’s research began with a series of interviews with different people. To make communication with her interviewees easier, she made a scale model of wax that consisted of a number of empty rooms in which they could organize their personal mental spaces. The model was soaked in Vaseline to make it more tactile. During the conversations her guests all started touching the empty spaces of the model. Their memories opened up and dialogue could begin: they started talking about the rooms they had lived in and the rooms they would like to live in. Each person gave different names to the rooms and related different experiences to them, while using the same model. There were also spaces to which they all reacted the same. Alicia calls these rooms universal.