W
hat defines a home? Why do we treasure certain objects or feel that we need to have others to represent our home? From over-stylised Instagram feeds of glossy interiors to the daily news reports in Mallorca about the severe housing crisis, it’s a good time to step back and reflect on the many possibilities of home.
“HEART·H”, an exhibition curated by artist, designer and curator Sylvia Sánchez Montoya, and currently on view at the CCA Andratx, questions ideas around this idea of home. For Sánchez-Montoya, the home can be a piece of land as much as it can be a conceptual idea that connects to sound, smell or an historic artefact. “HEART·H is an exhibition that reimagines the concept of home as a perception rather than a fixed reality – a feeling rather than a physical form. This exhibition deconstructs the idea of the domestic space, reconfiguring it into clusters of activities that collectively define what we call home. It draws a series of layers, moving from the public to the private - from the recibidor (entrance hall) to the womb,” writes Conor Creighton.
Invited by the CCA Andratx to curate a show around design and Mallorca, Sánchez-Montoya wanted to go beyond a survey show and present artists whose work is grounded in the handmade but with a deeper conceptual approach around the question of place, belonging and the body. She wanted to push deeper into this subject and feature work that explored the idea of the home and the idea of building a house through objects. “My questioning, whether curating or in my own art work, is always about how we give value to material culture. How does value build through culture? We need an intention in the home, whether a ritual, scent or object, which by either caring for it, touching it, creating stories around it, we give value to that intention," she explains.
