A Room you may have missed is a project initiated by Laurent Roque in collaboration with Jessica Freeman- Atwood, London-based curator, Alyssia Lou, London-based graphic designer, and Fabien Silvestre Suzor, Brussel based photographer. Together they have reimagined the space of Laurent Roque house with a vivid red tent that envelops the stairwell. At once intimate and expansive, this nomadic structure feels as disoriented as it does playful and protective.
In The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard examines how the familiar realm of the home accommodates the dreamer’s consciousness: “ The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamers, the house allows one to dream in peace.
Reconsidering the very conception of the house, A Room You May have Missed entices the dreamer to explore a site where the ordinary and the unexpected become indistinguishable.
it is not by chance that Sigmund Freud places the homes ( helm) at the core of his theory of the uncanny (unheimlich). here, the Heimlich-defined by Freud as ‘arousing a sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within the four walls of his house’- is disturbed by the unfamiliar.
‘in the beginning, we sought to clad ourself’ wrote Adolf Loos in 1898, describing fabric as the first architectural feature, which acted as second skin before the invention of walls. Originally built as a refuge to provide shelter, the tent is among the oldest of human dwelling, with it came to the notion of an inside and an outside. Responding to the basic need for warmth and protection, Laurent Roque’s tent is a bachelardian cocoon where we may retreat to dream.
Piero Della Francesca’s The Dream of Constantine comes to mind where an angel visits Emperor Constantine in a fairytale, rose-colored, cone-topped tent. This is the instinct that drives children to create makeshift tents out of bedsheets, temporary sanctuaries where they can escape into imaginary worlds and travel to unknown lands.
The ephemeral architecture in A Room You May Have Missed is a party inspired by the monumental
16th-century indigo cloths, painted with scenes of Christ’s Passion, that would form a temporary chapel during Holy Week inside the Benedictine Abbey Church of San Nicolo del Boschetto on Genoa. Just as these cloths would form sacred enclosures within the church, masking the walls, ceiling, and altar, so Laurent Roque’s contemporary iteration creates a cosmic cathedral-like space, but hee awaiting our own imaginary projections. ‘Question you teaspoons’ is George Perec’s call to arms in his Species of Spaces ( 1974) where he urges us to free ourselves from the shackles of quotidian habit that blind us to the possibilities of the space we call home.
At 9A Crofton Road, the function is subverted: there are no more bedrooms, kitchens; all evidence of human occupations has been erased; doors and simulated on translucent white fabric, yet resolutely denied of their original function as openings onto other spaces. In an Alice in Wonderland distortion of scale, these trompe-l’oeil representations are printed slightly larger or smaller than we expect, unnerving us in their dislocation of the familiar.
Perec recounts his struggles to imagine a room without use, as he attempts to banish habitual functions and rhythms from his mind, to go beyond what he calls ‘ this improbable limit.’ His effort to conjure purpose to inhabited spaces lead him to ponder MC Escher’s labyrinthine engraving and René Magritte’s surrealist painting of interiors.
Finally, he resorts to his own fantasies: ‘i thought of the dreams I had had on this very subject, discovering a room I didn’t know about my own apartment.’
A similar vision is materialized in the exhibition where through an interstice the viewer discovers an imaginary garden. On the far side of the room, we see a red rectangle of fabric, attached to a painted canvas, like the backdrop in a stage set. It corresponds to the door that we perceived has concealed this secret realm, suggesting a surreal extension of space. The threshold of the open door leading to this hidden frames the intersection between one reality and another. The objects in the garden are immediately recognizable as plants and leaves, yet partially coated in hues of blue, green, and pink.
Are they in fact artificial, fictional objects? Nature and ornament, the real and the imaginary dissolve into one another as they spill over the bounds of the canvas and into space itself.
Text by Jessica Freeman- Atwood