Rituals of Solitude

In the summer of 2020, a group of twelve architects undertook a week-long artistic residency, confined within the rooms of a ruined house on a small island in the Venetian lagoon. Each architect was isolated in a separate room, furnished with a single piece of furniture they had no part in selecting.

The house was an almost exact replica of what was once believed to be an unrealized project by American architect John Hejduk, originally presented during a 1978 seminar at IUAV in Venice: The House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate.

The House features a 3 × 4 vertical grid of box-like units suspended from the front side of a square wall. At the back, these twelve units are connected on each level by a corridor and two cylindrical circulation cores. The contrast between the exposed front and hidden back of the House is both functional and symbolic: while the front presents a postmodern composition of windows and walls, the back exhibits modernist elements such as pilotis and strip windows. Each hanging unit serves as a single room furnished with only one piece of furniture—such as a fridge, a sink, or a bed—except for the seventh unit, which is left completely empty. Each piece of furniture defines and isolates a specific domestic action, while the emptiness of the seventh unit draws the inhabitant’s gaze toward a tower located across a nearby campo. At the height of the seventh unit, a one-way mirror on the tower’s wall reflects the inhabitant’s image whenever he stands inside the empty room. Behind the one-way mirror, Venetians inside the tower can observe the House’s inhabitant without being seen, thereby forcing him into a disquieting ritual of surveillance and control.

Built in the 1970s on a private island by an eccentric Contessa Luisa Albertina di Tesserata—without Hejduk’s knowledge—the replica of The House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate faced impending demolition, as its new owners intended to replace it with a luxury glamping resort. The Unfolding Pavilion reached an agreement with the owners, securing a contract that permitted a temporary occupation of the house to carry out twelve site-specific installations as part of a one-week artistic residency. The sole stipulation was that the project’s outcome would remain confidential until after the house’s demolition. Adhering to this agreement, the project proceeded as planned, and in December 2020, the house was sadly demolished.

The remarkable story of the replica of John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate is at the heart of Rituals of Solitude, a transmedia exhibition in three acts curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando, first presented on the occasion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.

Conceived amid the global lockdown, Rituals of Solitude is a travelling exhibition that explores the proliferation of fake news, the reversal of the traditional relationship between private and public space; the paradoxical rituals through which homes are inhabited; the ways visual technologies are domesticated as tools for self-representation and connection; the accumulation, fetishization, and display of objects in domestic interiors; and the states of solitude created by forced isolation.

Rituals of Solitude is organised in three acts:
Act I, launched in December 2020, is an online exhibition that documents the twelve site-specific works produced during the one-week residency in the house.
Act II is the offline and itinerant instance of the exhibition, first shown in Venice in May 2021 inside the Contessa’s former boat, moored at Punta della Dogana during the opening of the Architecture Biennale.
Act III, introduced in January 2022, is a digital interactive environment that reconstructs and reinterprets the experience of the Venetian exhibition.

The Unfolding Pavilion is a curatorial and editorial project by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando that pops up at major architecture events in previously inaccessible but architecturally significant spaces. On each occasion the Unfolding Pavilion features a different theme inspired by the space it occupies, by means of commissioned original works that react to it and to its wider cultural-historic background. The Unfolding Pavilion doesn’t necessarily care about the hosting event’s theme. It lets its occupied space inspire its own theme. Without a good exhibition space (of the finest architectural making), the Unfolding Pavilion doesn’t have any reason to exist. Like any pop-up project, the Unfolding Pavilion only lasts for a short but intense period of time.