Martino De Grandis

A space without a specific geography, mirror of this ever changing society.

Where are you?—I'm home.

From the housing crisis to its commodification, we are currently experiencing a new condition in which domestication invades every field of human activities including work spaces, while the house is becoming more and more a space for production and a medium of subsistence. On top of that, dwellings under capitalism have progressively led to a homogenization of cultural specificities into a generic sameness made of minimalist interior, white walls and IKEA furniture.

To investigate the meaning of this shift I explored four different Airbnbs together with my parents, probing their ideal type of home by observing how they live their own constructed image of functionality, beauty and domesticity. In a dystopian polarisation between objects standardisation and its mass production and the need for recognisability and individualisation fostered by social media, the interior is no longer an extension of our cultural identity but rather the display of a society in which furniture has to respond more to aesthetic values than to content.