The House For Doing Nothing, Aristide Antonas

"The substance of everyday life, the humble and rich "human matter", cuts across all alienation and is the foundation of "disalienation". If we take the words human nature dialectically and in their full sense, we can say that the critique of everyday life studies human nature concretely". Henri Lefebvre

 

The first monograph devoted in France to the work of Aristide Antonas, this exhibition unfolds his project The House for Doing Nothing in several chapters, like so many milestones on the visitor's journey.

 

Developed since 2008 by Antonas, architect and philosopher, the work was born out of a reading of the thinking advocated by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008). In his book, the author invites us to resist all forms of engagement with the world and to withdraw from it in order to establish a critical distance. Aristide Antonas, for his part, sees this form of 'withdrawal' not as a heroic posture of resistance, but as the basis of our current relationship with everyday life and reality.

 

The House for Doing Nothing uses narrative and fiction to sketch out the life of this protagonist - hero or ordinary man. In the age of hyperconnectivity, the domestic condition is now traversed by a form of paradox: "being at home" is at the same time being connected to the world. The individual is no longer isolated from the public sphere. On the contrary, it is this withdrawal into oneself that now structures the social sphere. The home has become an interface between the private and public spheres, revealing the deep-seated crisis in the traditional notions of "self", "community" and "society".

 

It is this new nature of the home - and therefore of Man - that Aristide Antonas sets out to explore in The House for Doing Nothing, by questioning the role, and indeed the political responsibility, of the domestic condition.