The Domestic Discontinuous | Ioana Suliciu

If Georges Perec’s ‘Life, a User’s Manual’ had been written 40 years later and through a Viennese, rather than a Parisian apartment building sectioned to reveal its current and past inhabitants, their social status, possessions, exploits, misfortunes and travels, the cast of characters in that schematic architectural section with which the book concludes would be endless, the italicized names of previous inhabitants would run in the hundreds, several would be recurrent. Increasingly, people like I inhabit temporary homes and combinations of flats, switching commuter- for family or vacation homes or for studying in-between cities, countries, continents even. The home’s no longer a monolith, but a myriad of discontinuous living environments, re-meshed through a continuous presentation & representation of its instagrammed contents and exchange between its often discontinuous components. Yet is there any part that remains solid in this incessant dissolution and exchange? Are the things too heavy to carry around but impossible to part with not those that perhaps ground us, solidifying new typologies of the not-so-private things we have in common?

Born in Bucharest, Ioana Suliciu graduated in 2016 with a Masters’ degree in Architecture from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and has been living and working as an architect in several countries since, among those China, Austria, Romania and The Netherlands. Since 2015 she has been doing research into Austrian post-war modernity and its urban planning legacies via Roland Rainer’s work under Professor C. Wagenaar’s direction.