loading

The House for Doing Nothing

The House for Doing Nothing

Also known as Slavoj Žižek's House or The Responsible House.

The House for Doing Nothing

Based on an observation by Slavoj Žižek the responsible house is a place designed to follow the Slovenian philosopher’s comment about responsibility nowadays. Following Žižek’s remarks, the global condition of nowadays cannot orient towards any concrete political attitude: the most appropriate action in order to undertake a political responsibility would be to do nothing. Doing nothing (far niente) was proposed as one of the most elevated experiences by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his “Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire” when he describes his isolation in a semi abandoned lake island. In Greece there are many deserted islands that could host such populations of responsible houses: they would look like exile places, like banal livable internet stations and in the same time like paradise options: all representing a responsible condition for today, this includes an ironic look to Žižek's approach and the fact that Žižek is describing something existing. A condition of exile, promoted as necessity for balancing a future responsibility and, in the same time, the culmination of a desired condition is linked to an idiosyncratic inaction. The responsible apartment intends to propose a view of a population of such units for doing nothing. Are all those descriptions of inaction present in this design? A body culture is evidently the left over of a condition of the self. The Internet structures invisible communities that could all act in similar ways and form together juxtaposed responsible apartments in semi abandoned areas. Following this rationale the project is supposed to function in a double bind: from the one side it shows a possible condition or a materialization proposed by an exaggeration of Žižek’s remark; from another point of view it could be read as a counter project commenting already Žižek's argument.

The apartment is structured as a unified single space divided by mobile elements and curtains. A swimming pool is supposed to give a rhythm of a body’s temporality. Printers and a good connection form the material part of the common world and the invisible public sphere. All services are performed through the existence of a “courrier” system that distributes products to the units on demand.

 

In collaboration with Katerina Koutsogianni, Kristy Garikou and Alexis Georgiadis

Zizek: do nothing (in Greek)

“A critical analysis of the present global constellation- one which offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "YES, precisely that!" There are situations when the only truly "practical" thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to "wait and see" by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the Resistance and fight the Germans; Sartre's point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it.

An obscene third way out of the dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying...”

Slavoj Zizek, Violence, First Picador Edition: August 2008.

loading