Opening: Tuesday, August 5th, 6 p.m
The habit implies not only, as its most common interpretation suggests, something stable, lasting, and enduring, but also something subject to change over time—a kind of mutability. Habit comprises the actions, words, clothing, and gestures we repeat; it is what is closest to us, what surrounds us. If we consider the similarity in Spanish between habitar (to inhabit) and hábito (habit), we underscore all that a home represents for the body—and how that body has the power to construct a home, a habitat.
This habituation between body and home, between gesture and clothing, between the everyday and the strange, is intertwined in the works of Hicham Benohoud, Januário Jano, and Franzisca Siegrist. In their images, the domestic becomes a space of estrangement: veiled, fragmented bodies, absorbed by walls, fabrics, or objects. Rooms fold in on bodies, the inside turns outward, and memories are built from remnants. The scenes resemble rituals suspended between memory and the present, between intimate gestures and a compelling force. In every case, the habitual is transformed into language, and the home, far from offering shelter, becomes an unstable architecture.
Image: Franzisca Siegrist, Sculptural Abstractions #6, 2020.