The American-born, Frankfurt-based artist Mike Bouchet highlights a dissection of a floating house at an exhibition, which runs from July 1 through 12 Sept. at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Dubbed as New Living, the sculpture is a chainsawed version of a 250 square meter single-family house (Watershed), which he had created for the 2009 Venice Biennale. While the original version emphasized suburbanization of water through a prefab home, its transformed or flattened version uses physical components of the house as material for assessing the physical and psychological dimensions of contemporary suburban architecture.
The new adaptation shows how catastrophes such as hurricanes or earthquakes smash works of art to smithereens. After removing plywood, roofing felt, rusty nails, screws, and iron clips, Mike rearranged the onetime compact prefabricated house into 15 stacks of almost equal size. Now, it is no more a house, rather it is another building kit for erecting a simple dwelling.
