That house, the one-floored house with the gabled roof, the one we drew as the prototype for home when we were kids, now takes on a disturbing semblance in Erwin Wurm’s installation.
Embedded on the top of a tall building, the house has lost its axis, flipped onto its roof, and now begins to slide, as if on the point of falling. The house thus becomes a threat, primed to attack.
What is a peaceful, prototypical construction, the archetype of home and family has been transformed into something quite different and thus transformed into a life-threatening situation.
With this simple gesture, every bit as simple as that childhood sketch, Wurm turns the sensation of stability felt by someone approaching the building upside-down, and also overturns the stable idea of family, home, the middle-class, heteronormality and so on, placing these pre-established concepts into tension with playful irony.
