MNAE Presents: House

The Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata's Spring 2012 exhibition HOUSE explores dwellings of all kinds. This exhibition is a little city that collects some interconnected examples of homes, atmospheres, greenhouses, guts, nests, wombs, and commodities that surround and preserve the development of sensations and life forms. Some are “natural,” created by ecological agents like animals, plants, and microbes. Others are “artificial”--economic artifacts ranging from air-conditioning machines to doll houses. And still others are "naturecultural," existing only through relationships between all kinds of earthlings, like Ephemerata Gardens, where the HOUSE exhibition takes place.

The words ecology and economy share the Greek root oikos, “house.” Economies and ecologies are nested in scalar arrays inside the biggest house of all – Earth, the biosphere, a fantastical superworld that contains all others, or more correctly has been made to contain them with maps, climate models, and photos from space. A house doubles as a world or cosmos, depending on the scale you experience it from, and losing your house can be the end of the world. Houses build and destroy other houses and worlds in order to come into existence. The difference between individual houses and worlds like the sky, soil, water, or language is that we live and breathe worlds. These worlds precede our inhabitation – whereas houses are things built to mark off parts of worlds as ours for living in. So how would you build a world-sized house? Let’s figure this out together!