How Do We Know What Home Looks Like? The Unité d'Habitation de Le Corbusier at Firminy, France

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© Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Martha Rosler

How Do We Know What Home Looks Like? The Unité d'Habitation de Le Corbusier at Firminy, France, 1993

Video, color, sound, 30 min Camera: Martha Rosler Performers: Mme Bousquet, La Famille Caleyron, Bernadette Celette, Brigitte Marconnet, Jean-Manuel Morilla, Les Femmes Sur L'Herbe, Les Enfants, Joshua M.R. Neufeld

GF0002009.00.0-1999

Artwork text

This video was made for the group exhibition of Unité, one of Le Corbusier’s biggest social housing projects, at Firminy, in south central France. The artists were invited to show their personal view of this project, which has become a memorial to the failure of utopian theory and social practice, but which is roundly defended by many of its tenants and those in the architecture and social-planning communities. A sweep with the camera shows the housing project and finally focuses on a wing of flats that has been closed for ten years, looking for traces of the former inhabitants. Rosler lets the inhabitants of Unité speak for themselves and asks them in particular what adaptations they have made to the building and themselves. (Sabine Breitwieser)