Sophie Valero
La troisieme maison, 2010
Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
'We enter a house together with the wind blowing a window open, and this element will give its rythm to the rooms’ crossing . The voice of a man is following us through the different parts of the place, telling the story of his house’s construction. At first it looks more like a documentary approach, a kind of interview. But little by little, the view we have of the house is changing, it moves away, on an other level. Before the place was strictly the house of this particular man, but it becomes a space where everybody can go, and by extansion, the house of everybody, and anybody. The speech of the man becomes more and more abstract, the shape of the house he is talking about is much more intangible. Then the voice tells us the house disappeared, without giving us any hint to know if it is still the same house which disappeared or another one, an ancient one. At this point it has nothing more to do with a documentary in its usual way, the matter is no more to know the authenticity of his story and whether the house really vanished or not. The house’s territory escapes from us, it’s a space beco- ming a poetic evocation, with this metaphor of the fire erasing every part of the rooms, with as only remains the house ashes’ contours, mixing all the objects, the pieces of furnitures, the walls in a same and elusive matter. In the end, we return to the open entrance door, and the wind becomes stronger, as inviting us to go outside. The house became this fragile space that we put between ourselves and the others, the world, a space perpe- tualy changing and reinventing itself.'