What’s a home?

our loved ones
a right
a space under construction
a postpatriarcal territory
an androgynous space
a wish
a womb
a hut
a prison
a refuge
a boundary
a place to live
a container
a place where we would like to die
a diffuse space
a sphere of intimacy
a nest
a studio
a shelter
a working place
a private space
a place for shopping
a public space
a set of moral elements that can make un/happiness possible
a place for love
a place for sex
a place of care
a place of pain
a killer
a hell
a meeting point
a space of freedom
a set of objects
a personal archive
a space of animism
a colonized zone
a place where we daily leave the world
a temporary exile
a political space
our body
an ecosystem
a city
a country
the Earth

Bunga returns home with his first solo show in a gallery in Portugal, but he is not the same person that he was when he left the country; every trip is transformative and every homecoming is rejuvenating. Photographs, videos, paintings, sculptures and drawings fill the space of the gallery, halfway between his home and his studio.

“We call home to the space in which all objects exist as subjects (it is the opposite of slavery)”, explains Emanuele Coccia. Houses are containers, and in most cases their architecture comes pre-determined, so therefore the objects that fill them make them habitable, and also transform them into our homes. In each object there is something of us and it’s from this connection that the feeling of belonging comes from.

Lately, we have been forced to find new ways of being in our homes as a result of their obsolescence. Houses went from refuges to prisons, they were converted in production and consumption centres where public and private get mixed up, some are hyper-connected and others practically isolated, lonely or stifling, hyper-technologic or sustainable, and halfway between the physical and the virtual. These multiple contradictions in the way of inhabiting our homes show their hybridization, and their mutation into laboratories that study new ways of coexisting and socializing, and where other ways of living and dying can be learned.

The pandemic has not only placed all bodies at home, but also left the ones that didn’t have a home, or that lost one, on the street. All that they have left of their homes are their suitcases and cars full of objects. Their house-bodies are urban monuments that remind us of the failure of our democratic institutions.

While our homes change, the earth is in ruins, and we, humans, that together with other animal species are less than 10% of the biomass of the planet, are the ones causing all these imbalances, more and more rapidly consuming terrestrial resources. Is there space for a future when we are squandering the resources of our common home?

The work that Carlos Bunga (1976, Porto) produces combines an intense materiality with the evocation of psychological states. His sculptural and pictorial structures propose architecture as body and mental space. In his cycles of construction and transformation, the artist explores states of dispossession and nomadism.

Bunga has participated in Manifesta 5, in San Sebastian (2004), at the São Paulo Biennial (2010), and at Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015). He has had many solo shows in museums, which include: Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2010); Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles; Museu de Serralves, in Porto (2012); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, in Mexico City (2013); Haus Konstruktiv Museum, in Zurich (2015); MACBA, in Barcelona (2015); MOCA, in Detroit (2018); maat, in Lisboa (2019); MOCA Toronto (2020); or Whitechapel, in London (2020). Among his upcoming exhibitions, we can highlight: Secession in Vienna (2021), and Palácio de Cristal, part of MNCARS, in Madrid (2022).