It is no coincidence that the second iteration of A Room You May Have Missed appears exactly one year after this nomadic installation was first presented in London.
The observance of ritual lies at the heart of the annual ceremony during which Laurent Roque performs a re-imagining of a domestic space using a mobile architecture of fabric. Echoing the widespread seasonal hanging of textiles in the churches, places, and streets of the Italian RenaissanceLaurent Roque found particular inspiration in the monumental
16th-century indigo cloths painted with a scene of the Passion which covered the walls, vaults, and after of the Benedictine Abbey Church of San Nicolo del Boschetto in Genoe during Holy Week.
Last year Laurent Roque created their own sacred enclosure, enveloping the interior of their apartment with a huge red tent beyond which lay a phantasmagorical garden in a fictional room.
In this year’s realization, Laurent Roque has transformed the familiar space of a traditional fashioned from a vivid yellow cloth which seems to emanate the warmth and light of the sun. In The Principale of Cladding (1898). Adolf Loose describes how animal hides and textiles represent the earliest architectural elements, assembly by ancient humans who sought safety and warmth while sleeping. These protective skins long preceded the bricks and stone walls that later reinforced in the existing woven dwellings and were alluded to in Loos’ own work, most notably in the bedroom he created for his wife, Lina. There, the walls and cabinets were shrouded in white curtains, the parquet floor was masked by an azure blue carpet and a white fur rug lay above, becoming an extension of the bed. in a similar way, Laurent Roque’s yellow tent evokes this primordial impulse for homeliness and protection. It also frames the space of dreams, evoking the intimate embrace of children’s makeshift bedsheet dens: temporary sanctuaries where they can escape the rituals of everyday life and travel to imaginary worlds. Here, the supple fabric mediates between the solid architectural world that is physically present and the realm of make-believe.
In Laurent Roque’s fictional world, rooms are no longer defined by function but by fantasy.
Within the yellow tent, recognizable architectural elements reappear in a new uncanny form.
Spectral columns, doors, and radiators are printed onto translucent white fabric but are stripped of their original function, their very materiality subverted by the diaphanous material. In a surreal distortion of scale, these absurd simulations are printed slightly larger, or smaller than we expect, destabilizing the accepted meanings we would normally attach to the familiar. Separated from the veneer of function, the home is shown to be one of the most inexplicable places of all.
In his Species of Space ( 1974), George Perec recounts his struggles to visualize a room without use, as he attempts to banish habitual functions and rhythms from his mind and to go beyond what he calls ‘ this improbable limit’. His efforts to conjure purposeless domestic spaces lead him to ponder the interiors of Magritte’s surrealist paintings and the inverted stairways, inaccessible windows, and dead-end corridors of the uninhabited labyrinth in Jorge Luis Borges ‘ short story The immortal’.
Eventually, he resorts to his own fantasies: ‘ I thought of the dream I had on this very subject discovering a room I didn’t know about in my own apartment.’ A startlingly similar vision is staged in this apartment where, through two openings in the tent, the visitor encounters an imaginary room. At the far end, we see a large dark canvas resembling a theatrical backdrop with two yellow doors projected onto it. they correspond in size and color to the two doorway through which we enter this secret realm that would otherwise have been concealed by the fabric, suggesting a mysterious extension of space. The object on the floor is immediately recognizable as piled leaves, forming a shadow directly under the oval-shaped relief on the ceiling.
These mimic the season of autumn and form a circular pool on the ground, creating a mirage that seemingly reflects a tree above. On closer inspection, we discover they are in fact cut-outs of leaves from the ubiquitous plane trees that line the Parisian streets, made of linoleum in the style of parquet flooring. The familiar and the improbable, artifice and nature, inside and outside dissolve into one another as the viewer is given the fleeting impression that they are indeed standing under a tree. this Room is defined more by sensation than by what may be deemed plausible within the accepted limitations of material space, recalling the blue star-spangled vaults in churches and chapels which encourage worshipers to imagine they are below a celestial canopy.
The scenery is animated by a performance from musician Yndi Ferreira who emerges seamlessly from the fictional world, painted in the same colors as the canvas. her layered audio works resonate throughout the room, combining sounds from the apartment. Recordings of nature and birdsong that she has witnessed on her walks through the expansive Bois de Vincennes at sunrise form the first layer of her work. She has then transcribed this woodland symphony onto a musical score and interpret the unexpected patterns thus exposed through improvisation on her guitar. These Rythmic sequences, recorded in the empty apartment, are then superimposed onto the original random sounds of the forest so that time and space intermingle. During her performance, she interacts with the imaginary outside realm, paying her guitar under the tree in front of us, adding yet another layer to the recordings.
Because of the very ephemerality of the installation and the dreams that have constructed its reality, this room is akin to an apparition, a vision momentarily transforming the familiar space which may at any moment melt away.