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.