Home Discomforts

How will we feed ourselves in the future? Do laundry? Stay comfortable? Care for one another? With rising sea levels, increasing air temperatures, scarcer resources, and new energy regimes, the future of domesticity will require radical changes in rituals and behaviours: a redesign.

What does the market offer us today? More efficient air conditioning, smart kitchen appliances, ever-speedier home delivery services. Short-term comforts that displace rather than reduce the labour and energy required to maintain business-as-usual lifestyles. Upgrading home insulation only results in short-term energy savings. Similarly, widespread ownership of washing machines resulted in increased water usage and laundry being done more frequently. The culture of efficiency has failed us. Home Discomforts, curated by Marianna Janowicz, presents the work of contemporary architects and designers who imagine alternative ways of living, more varied and less reliant on the modern comforts of sealed, stable internal environments. For too long the Global North has grown and over-consumed at the expense of the Global South. It is here, in Europe and other overdeveloped regions, where we will need to learn to be less comfortable. Could reducing consumption, pooling resources, and sharing the work of social reproduction offer opportunities for a future less comfortable but more happy?

Marianna Janowicz is a London-based architect, researcher, and member of the architectural collective Edit. Her research focusses on sites of reproductive labour, both inside and outside the home as seen through the lens of feminist and environmental scholarship. Previously she held residencies at the Canadian Centre of Architecture (2021) and the Design Museum in London (2022–23), where her project investigated personal laundry practices in the context of contemporary housing and internal environment. She has written about architecture, design and society for the Architectural Review, Disegno, New York Review of Architecture, and e-flux Architecture, among others. She teaches at the University for the Creative Arts and the London School of Architecture. She is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Participants: Ankit Kumar Singh, Daniel Parnitzke, Edit, HVAC (Lisa van Heyden & Enno Pötschke), Lacol, Superflux, TAKK.

The year-round exhibition programme of VI PER Gallery is supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, City of Prague, State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic.

The exhibition is supported by the LINA platform, co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme, and the University for the Creative Arts.