Machine à habiter

Isabella Mara

MACHINE À HABITER

MACHINE À HABITER

“The house is a machine for living in” Le Corbusier, 1923 (1)

A few months ago I made a travel, from Milan I covered about five thousand kilometers through Italy to Eastern Europe in the Western Balkans, through Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and finally back to Milan.Here I started to rethink everything I had seen, in particular the relationship between people and their ho-mes, their relationship to urban life, coupled with theories about the identity of François de Singly (2), in which he points out that today we should abandon the metaphor of “roots” and the “eradication”, regarding the individual’s relationship with his community of birth and replacing them with those of the “cast and hoist the anchor”. This act has nothing to be final and conclusive, the roots die if removed from the earth, unlike the anchors are moved to many different ports. The anchor is linked to a ship which here takes on the appearance of a house, mobile home, traveling, a person carries within his house, on a trip that lasts a lifetime. With the image of the man-house-anchor I worked on the material I had collected, small pieces every day, and I drew with newspaper clippings, memories of people, places, dreams, hopes and differences. The rela-tionship between people and their homes is thus reconstructed and represented in this”album-sequences” , the only element that gives concrete is the desire to preserve a moment, a miniature of life. The house is understood as a “machine” in the sense of mechanism, a tool for live and in living riesiede man’s being.

Isabella Mara, March 2011

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1 - Le Courbusier, Vers une architecture, Paris 19232 - François de Singly, Les uns avec les autres: Quand l’individualisme crée du lien, Armand Colin 2003