Christine Bjerke: Dissolving the Dwelling

The domestic is often seen as a place of privacy, enclosure, and constancy—yet it is being disrupted and transformed by the both invisible and visible layers that are added through global connectivity and disproportional access to a private and safe realm. This digitalisation of domesticity is rapidly challenging the physical framework of the dwelling as it increasingly expands the outline of the home beyond the built space—constantly roaming through spatial temporalities.

Flows of technological data, information and markets are repeatedly being introduced into the private realm—changing how to navigate both the interior and exterior. The online is a space of privilege and it holds the excessive spaces where unequal value systems are thriving while perpetuating unpaid domestic labour. Meanwhile, the digitalised dwelling also has the potential to unleash new ways of creating alternative actions of exchange and furthering modes for potential gendered and financial equity.

Dissolving the Dwelling seeks to explore transitional spaces in-between the private and the public, the virtual and the physical, the official and the unofficial—all within the intangible notion of what a private realm might be. Through built reflections on spaces and objects, the exhibition constructs a series of incomplete zones dissolving the dwelling into the city.

Christine Bjerke is an architect and educator based in Copenhagen. She is co-founder of the think tank In-Between Economies and in 2020 she founded Christine Bjerke Studio. Her interests focus on the intersections of the built environment, gender studies, economic development, technology, design, and architecture. She is currently teaching the Urbanism & Societal Change Masters Programme at The Royal Danish Academy - Architecture, Design, Conservation.

MAGAZIN is an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna run by Jerome Becker, Matthias Moroder and Florian Schafschetzy. MAGAZIN presents the work of local and international architects in solo exhibitions that are especially conceived for the spaces in the Weyringergasse location—framed by corresponding publications and lectures.