User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution
User’s Manual: Grand Domestic Revolution is a year long project initiated by Casco — Office for Art, Design & Theory “exploring the possibilities for a domestic living space to become a site for investigating and exercising the social through an integral approach to art, design and theory”. For one year a private apartment in an Utrecht neighbourhood is inhabited by different artists, designers, urban researchers, architects, and green-thumbed homebodies.
The title comes from a book by an American writer Dolores Hayden who describes what she calls the ‘material feminist’ movement in the early 20th century US — these women were the first feminists who identified the economic exploitation of women’s domestic labour by men as the most basic cause of women’s inequality. While other feminists campaigned for political or social change with philosophical or moral arguments, the material feminists concentrated on material life they socialized domestic work, by sharing childcare, housekeeping and setting up public kitchens; practicial tactics that could spark new spatial imagination for the usually invisible work done on the domestic front.
As one of the temporary residents of the GDR flat, Wietske will set up an urbanibalist headquarters for two weeks. Between 15-30 June, the public-domestic-studio apartment becomes a convivial experimental kitchen-pharmacy hosting dinners, talks and consultations to find and transform ingredients collected from in and around the city of Utrecht into a treatment for common domestic ills of our time.
Gathering knowledges from Chinese herbalist-neighbour, local residents, an epidemiologist, monks, tree doctors, pharmacists, artists and more, to draw a curative geography of Utrecht — its hygiene, toxicity, medicinal qualities, urban food supply routes and politics — that comes up with new possibilities on how we can use the city as remedy and change our existing habits of consumption in the urban context.
GDR and all that awaits: Cups of tea and convivial happenstance
Grand Domestic Revolution photoset