THE INCOMPLETE DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE

a process project

2021 | MIT SA+P | with: Florence Ma | advisors: Ana Miljacki + Deborah Garcia

MASTER’S THESIS

a bodily book

IDLC 00. THE MANIFESTO

Our environments are failing us. Modernism’s relentless pursuit of efficiency, control, and purity has birthed a sterilization that has weakened our bodies bit by bit, little by little, to the point that they have almost been lost.

We seek to unpack our relentless reality: its cold corners and its hard edges, its celebration of virtual futures and its endlessly scrolling present, its crumbling concrete and rusting rebar, its fluorescent lighting and dying house plants, its unflinching march towards a singular Progress.

We question the modernist notions of control and efficiency as tools for better living.

We seek to squat, to occupy, to co-opt. We are subversive. We operate on and within.

We are soft surfaces and unexpected jungles.

We are talking about your house plants and your pillows, the faux fur you walk by in the fabric store and caress but never purchase, the fake Ficus in your mom’s entry way that she’s been watering for years, that carefully placed curtain that undulates between your back and your bed as your zoom call drones on, and the things that call for you to hold them and be held by them.

But we are not tame nor subtle. We may love soft things, but this is not a soft touch. It is an explosion. We design, cultivate, and share supplements: shifts in viewing, entanglements, soft creations and strange installations. We work through examinations and operations within archives. Open to all, the resulting landscapes do not require heavy machinery and perhaps you should be impaired when you try them.

We want to feel. We want you to feel. While you have been otherwise occupied, so have we. Here is that occupation.