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💥BOOK LAUNCH 💥 WE ALSO WENT TO RAVES, BUT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THAT IN THIS BOOK 💫11 Years of Experimental Urban Practice by METASITU 🌐
EXPANDED DOMESTICITY
The domestic sphere is a highly politicized territory, where social hierarchies, everyday practices, and spatial set-ups are put in place to support larger political agendas.
Expanded domesticity are tactics that recognize a queering up the traditional domestic sphere. By performing domestic activities outside the dwelling, we propose to subvert the politicized aspects that are embedded in the idea of home, and reveal their mechanics.
In Western tradition, the notion of the ‘domestic’ is often understood as civilized and progressive - a space where the nationstate manifests itself through tradition and the pivotal societal structure of the family. The dwelling as the ultimate space in which to exercise power across gender, kinship, and labor lines. Far from a shelter, it is the ground zero for societal demands. When politics seep into the most private of abodes, can we reclaim freedom by performing domesticity in public? Following neoliberal logic, commercial and corporate places are eroding the ideological base of the home by replacing tradition and social norms with economic access and privilege; offering services of domesticity at a discounted rate.
OBJECTS FOR EXPANDED LIVING (2017)
PUBLICATION / 67 P / 2017 / TOKYO
Objects for Expanded Living examines the use of everyday domestic items - those associated with eating, sleeping, washing - beyond the traditional confines of the home, using contemporary Tokyo as its primary lens. The project forms part of a broader investigation into extended domesticity: a research thread that explores how power structures are encoded within the architecture of the home, and how domestic rituals, when unfolded into public space, can serve both as expressions of compliance and acts of subtle resistance.
In Tokyo, this expanded domesticity manifests vividly. Take the convenience store: once a kettle is made available for customer use and a stool is placed nearby, the space is reprogrammed. It becomes a dining room, a meeting place, a venue for a date. Through the presence of these seemingly innocuous objects, the store’s function morphs - blurring the lines between commercial and domestic, private and public. These items become micro-agents of spatial transformation, recalibrating the city from a system of architectural typologies into a web of services.
The project catalogues thirty-one such objects, presented as domesticity hacks in the form of scripts for a fictional YouTube channel. Borrowing the tone and format of online tutorials, the scripts funnel these tactics of resistance through a medium known for its optimism, and performative shallowness. The project reclaims the banal as political - using the vernacular of peer-to-peer culture to circulate new blueprints for living.
BLUE HOUSE (2017)
INSTALLATION / 32 SQM / 2017 / ATHENS
The Blue House is one of a series of spatial interventions in Athens, a city where real estate prices in the historic center have, in some cases, dropped to one-third of their pre-crisis value over the years 2010-2017. As a result, the urban core is increasingly populated by vacant residential and commercial units - spaces suspended between disuse and speculation.
The project addresses this vacancy by transforming empty flats within typical Athenian housing blocks (polykatoikias) into site-specific art installations. These reimagined interiors invite a reconsideration of what domestic space can be, proposing new programs and potentials that extend beyond conventional habitation.
This gesture prompts a pointed, self-referential question: should the final outcome be absorbed into the art market or the real estate market? The question mirrors one often posed in the art world: when a painting is sold, is it the canvas or the content that carries the value? The answer may appear obvious - it is the artwork itself, not the raw materials. But when applied to real estate, the same logic becomes fraught, revealing the speculative mechanics at play in both fields.
By drawing parallels between the volatility of the art market and that of real estate, this series becomes both critique and proposition - a tool to subvert systems of value production and to open space for dialogue around how worth is constructed, circulated, and claimed in contemporary urban environments.
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