Aristide Antonas: The House for Doing Nothing

The first solo exhibition dedicated to the work of architect and philosopher Aristide Antonas in France presents the project The House for Doing Nothing through several chapters, becoming the milestones for the visitors.

Begun in 2008, the work was born in reference to the ideas defended by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008). In his book, the author encourages us to resist any form of engagement with the world and to withdraw ourselves in order to establish some distance for criticism. Aristide Antonas considers this form of “withdrawal” as the foundation of our current relationship to the daily and the real rather than a heroic posture of resistance.

The House for Doing Nothing defines the protagonist’s—a hero or a common man—living environment in a fiction form of tale. In the era of hyperconnectivity, the domestic condition is experiencing a sort of paradox: “being at home” is also being connected to the world. The individual is no longer isolated from the public sphere. On the opposite, it is this withdrawal that now structures the social sphere. The home has become an interface combining the private and public spheres, revealing a deep crisis in the traditional notions of “self,” “community” and “society.”

It is this new nature of home—and therefore of man—that Aristide Antonas looks to challenge in The House for Doing Nothing, by questioning the role, or even the political responsibility of the domestic condition.

Aristide Antonas’ work spans philosophy, art, literature and architecture. As a writer and playwright he published novels, short stories, theater scripts and essays. His art and architecture work has been featured among other places in Istanbul Design biennial, Venice biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale, Display Prague, the New Museum and had solo institutional presentations in Basel’s Swiss Architecture Museum and in Austria’s Vorarlberger Architektur Institut. He won the ArchMarathon 2015 prize for his Open Air Office, was nominated for a Iakοv Chernikov Prize (2011) and for a Mies Van der Rohe Award (2009) for his Amphitheater House. He participated in documenta 14 with four architectural installations in Kassel and the Empty University in the School of Fine Arts in Athens. He works as a Professor of Architectural Design and Theory at the University of Thessaly, Greece. Aristide has been a visiting professor in the Bartlett UCL and at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Curator: Abdelkader Damani, director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire
Contact communication: Marine Bichon, marine.bichon@frac-centre.fr