Dwelling X

Lucy Orta's Dwelling X, 2004 is currently residing in the middle of Nottingham's Market Square for the duration of this years' NOW festival. I recently encountered it on my way into town for an evening out.  Dwelling X is fortified at night by security guards and a high fence. Whoever is dwelling in there, I thought, will certainly feel safe. When approaching the piece from across the square, I was drawn by a giant glowing egg-like object reminiscent, from a distance at least, of the large white balloon featured in the 1960's series The Prisoner.

Unlike the incarcerated character in the fashionably retro TV programme, people who get the most use from Orta's dwelling places are often specific groups directly linked in some way to the wider community.

Orta's work is described on her website as `brilliantly addressing issues of relational aesthetics, her principal field of intervention being the personal space of the individual fighting for survival in adverse conditions'.1

For the NOW Festival, she enlisted the help of local artists and community groups to create a version of her mobile habitat.  As almost a text-book example of Nicholas Bourriaud's description of aesthetics judged by the inter-human relations 2.
Dwelling X reminds me of earlier works by artists such as Vito Acconci, who in 1991 created a Mobile Linear City, which was effectively a city stored in a truck: six housing units telescoped into one. Dwelling X beckons the passer by, enticing people in the cold night air toward the warm arty simulation of a temporary den. It has the same effect as a tent with a torchlight glowing from the inside out.  On the exterior of the hot air balloon-like structure, there is a line of mini human silhouettes forming a queue, like an architectural frieze around the circumference of the dome. This was something I later realised, whilst looking through my photos, as an interesting comparison to the neo-classical architecture of the looming adjacent council house.

The main body of the art work is attached to what appears to be an ex-army lorry. The artist has described her work in the past as `transforming military stigma into civilian survival units.' 3 These two sections are then connected by what I can only describe as sculptural spaghetti; metal tubing forming a structure not unlike a child's climbing frame to the flat bed section of the truck.

Dwelling X follows a trend in contemporary art, prompted by the likes of Acconci, of taking traditionally private domestic environments and putting them in relatively public spaces. Another successful example, displayed at the last Liverpool Biennial in 2002, was Tatsuro Bashi's Villa Victoria. The artist constructed a hotel room around a public monument to the taciturn monarch. The general public could actually go and stay in the room overnight.

Orta's piece does not appear to have a continued and sustainable function in the same way that Acconci's `city' and Bashi's `villa' does. Yet it serves as a poignant reminder (especially when viewed at night) of the amount of people sleeping rough in the city who do not have a roof or tarpaulin to go over their heads. I found it a little ironic that such an art work, which claims to have such a socially conscious sentiment, is fenced up and guarded by security with walky-talkies. It was however, a wonderful, if somewhat absurd, sight to see what appeared to be someone pitching up for the night outside the city's most famous and loved municipal building.

1 Restany, Pierre, 2004, Orta Website

2 Bourriaud, Nicholas, 1998,
Relational Aesthetics

3 Orta, Lucy, Studio Orta Website

Jennie Syson is a curator and writer.

www.beherenow.org.uk