Washing Machine Athens

The Downtown Washing Machine Athens was done as a commission for CCA, when some interesting curators of the Canadian Centre for Architecture invited a number of architects to think about the house of the future. My concern was not to try to see once more how to ridicule the individual aspects of life; this was already done extensively with my Žižek's House. I wanted to work on a glorified future of the auxiliary tasks in the house — primarily the washing machine part — that I wanted to blow up and organize through an extensive disposition of many washing apparatuses across a pleasant city center; the ensemble would act as a theater stage where curators would manage different washing systems, with robotic actors providing a system of spectacles. A new theater of auxiliary life was targeted.

This was done first as an immobile image, a fictional Athens downtown providing this theatrical setting for washing everybody's clothes. CCA people were very kind but a bit blurred by my reply; they did not know what to do with it. For me it was obvious that the project is a bomb to the individual setting of the internal life of the house. I was reimbursed fully for my entry, but the project did not publish this work in this setting.

When asked by Hashim Sarkis to show some projects of mine in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale, I picked this one in order to think whether such a work could take the shape of one protocol complementing the common work on protocols done together with my friend and collaborator Thanos Zartaloudis — a protocol for a programmed and curated theatrical and functioning city center which will deactivate all the auxiliary parts of a house, the intimate core of the house (which also separates classes and makes individuals differ), into a social phantasmagoria. I did a video looping the same CCA image and exposed it among the other protocols in my Hall of Protocols for the Sarkis version of the Biennale.