Christine van Meegen

Department: Social Design
Website: studio-c-a-r-e.com

CURATED CATASTROPHES

Our homes are conflictual spaces, meaning they contain a variety of contradicting situations, tensions, and compromises. Managing this is problematic because we all change over time and our needs and expectations from our space continually shift. Our unexamined systems of interiors, blended with our belongings, begin to control us, instead of the other way around. Thus, our homes conspire to reduce our sense of autonomy. We forget what we really need from our home, become passive, feel overwhelmed and end up in a paradoxical, comfortable crisis. We might occasionally add a fresh layer of interior design to help the situation temporarily, but it doesn’t solve the essential problem: how to deal with a conflictual space.

The Curated Catastrophe offered by studio C.A.R.E. pushes the inhabitant out of the home-comfort-zone in order to break their paralyzation and reset the disharmony in the home. This inertia-breaking is initiated by playing the game Trojan House, which guides the player through tasks exploring spaces, experiencing them with different senses or from unusual perspectives. Impressions are recorded by the user into a personal logbook: a first step toward regaining control of one’s surroundings through deconstructing them and a basis for further cooperation with the studio. In the next steps of the relationship C.A.R.E. provides tailored instructions to implement an empathetic reconstruction of the interior. This is meant to alter our attitudes towards conflictual spaces, applying an approach similar to gardening: what is useless is cut out, what is helpful will be grown, and a healthy attitude toward failure, imperfection, and individual expression is achieved.