IKEA Disobedients

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Architecture & Design Purchase Fund (2012) Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida

IKEA Disobedients is a response to the world’s most important architectural actor, IKEA, and its promotion of homes as “independent republics” made of comfort and familiarity. Comprising alternative pop-up showrooms around the world, online-distributed movies, and the hacking of IKEA products; IKEA Disobedients reappropriates IKEA’s transmedia strategy to empower alternative domesticities, where otherness and engagement are encountered.

Launched in 2011, the work helped stop cases of eviction in Madrid, during the post-2008 financial crisis.

IKEA delivers societies. IKEA is a purveyor of social structuration. 98% of the people depicted in the IKEA catalogue are young. 92% of them are blond. They are either children, or busy having children. Everything IKEA manufactures is aimed at turning the sphere of domesticity into a sunny, happy, apolitical space inhabited by contented, healthy, young people. The independent Republic of Our Home. The sense of a home or a household’s life, however, may also be constructed from day to day in quite different fashions. Not all of us are healthy. Not all of us are young. Not all of us are into having children.

A different way of constructing ordinary life may, however, be conceived. Disobeying IKEA’s injunction to contain social interactions within sunny apolitical home-enclaves is what we propose as an urban counter-notion of the domestic: not a neutral space, but one installing controversy and disagreement precisely at the site where affections may also emerge.

Exhibitions:

Presented for the first time in video format as part of ‘9+1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design’, MoMA (12 Sep. 2012 – 25 Mar. 2013)

– Power Architecture, Casa da Arquitectura. Centro Portugues de Arquitectura. Matosinhos (17 November 2017 – 18 March 2018).

-Transmaterial Politics. Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Tabacalera, Madrid (27 Sep – 19 Nov. 2017).

– SUSAS Exhibition at Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, Shanghai Urban Space Art  (October 15 2017– January 15 2018)

–Stay.Now.Then: Housing Questions and Answers for 99 Years.  The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, ArkDes, Stockholm (16 April 2016 – January 8 2017).

– WEtransFORM, Neues Museum Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg (18 March – 19 June 2016).

– Los Jardines Inquietos. Centre D’Art la Panera (13 Jun.-11 Oct. 2015). Curated by Ester Partegàs.

– Haushalts Messe 2015. Ein Projekt der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau in den Meisterhäusern. (12.06. – 09.08.2015).

– EXPORT Arquitectura Española en el Extranjero. Fundación ICO, Madrid (24/02/2015-17/05/2015), Curated by Edgar González.

– 9ª Biennal d’art Leandre Cristòfol. Centre d’Art La Panera, Lleida (31 January-24 May 2015).

– Asuntos domésticos, Diputación Provincial de Huesca, 2014. (Sala de exposiciones de la Diputación de Huesca (28/12/2014 – 22/02/2015), curated by por Pedro Vicente, Alexandra Laudo).

– Atelier à Habiter exhibition at Z33, Hasselt (01 Dec. 2013-30 Mar. 2014). Curated by Evelien Bracke

– NOMADIC FURNITURE 3.0. New Liberated Living. MAK – Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna, Austria (12 Jun. – 6 Oct., 2013). Curated by Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Thomas Geisler and Martina Fineder.

– Design of the Year 2013 exhibition, Design Museum, London (20.03.2013-07.07.2013).

– IKEA Disobedients. Performance/ stacking of Ikea furniture/Vídeo-manifiesto of 8 min., for the IV Encuentro Internacional Performance & Arquitectura, El Arte es Acción (Ministerio de cultura. Curator: Ariadna Cantis), Nov. 2011.