Home on the street / Landscape in the palace

“My work falls somewhere between sculpture, architecture and design. Though trained in sculpture, since 1983 I have found it more interesting to think about the politics of need, desire, and circumstance. The work takes various forms and scales; I design public spaces, libraries, small architectural structures, live/work spaces, and bedrooms. I make furniture, not as ‘good design’ but rather as a way to isolate the body in its social environment. I think about how furniture can be used as a camera to isolate body actions and behaviour, and I look for the moment when the way people live at home is displaced into public view.”

Andrea Blum

HOME ON THE STREET are Designs for Living for low-cost urban housing for the at-home freelance-worker. Projected outside the exhibition space in Campo San Maurizio, the images present homes which rotate, fold, elevate and slide to provide maximum space for the necessities of daily life (live, sleep, eat, work).

LANDSCAPE IN THE PALACE is a project created specifically for the Salone delle Feste, the entertainments room, in the Palazzo Da Ponte, stART’s location.
The drawings are architectural structures of indeterminant scale in the process of emerging from or sinking into the surrounding landscape... these images are wallpapered within the molding of the venetian palace to create an ambiguity of time and place.

“The habits of domestic life are transposed onto the street. How we walk, talk, eat, relax is negotiated onto the scale of the public site. We leave our home and carry it like a backpack throughout the day. We take it with us to the street, the theater, the subway, the mall. We take our walls, chairs, libraries and vanities with us... We put on a coat and think of it as a warm bath. We buy a newspaper to fit around us like a mobile home. We sit in a park and find the same seat as yesterday. We drink a coffee to make the public space our living room. We take a train to get separate our room from another. We look in car windows to try to locate our reflection in a context. We cross the street and try to remember why we left home.”

Andrea Blum

SHORT BIO | ANDREA BLUM
 

Andrea Blum has built public projects in New York, California, Ohio, Minneapolis, Wisconsin, and Boston, as well as France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain and England.
In 2005, she took part in the 51st Venice Biennale (Italian Pavilion) with her project “Gardens & Fountains”. This work was sited in the heart of the Giardini of the Biennale and employed one of her recurrent themes of staging ‘sets’ for social interactions. This work has recently been re-sited at the
Mudam Museum in Luxembourg as a commission for a Mudam summer cafe. In March 2008 at Galerie Insitu /Fabienne Leclerc, Paris, she presented “Babel”, an exhibition of ‘sculpture’ and ‘drawings’ which combined the languages of architecture and design to physically and psychologically place the viewer inside the world of nature. On view until 5 October at La Maison Rouge / Fondation Antoine da Galbert is “Birdhouse Café”, a complex aviary designed to also serve as a public café. In 2005 Andrea Blum was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

For more information: www.andreablum.com
 

SHORT BIO | stART
 

In 2005, gallery owner Caterina Tognon, freelance curator Paola Tognon and architect Gabriele Pimpini created stART in Venice as a non-profit cultural association created to produce special projects involving the interrelationship between visual art, architecture and design and develop collaborations with public and private institutions.

For more information: www.startcontempo.org