Conversation piece_On the doorway_Proces

On The Doorway (2011)

Keywords: agency, private-public, door handles, mundane materiality

“In Germany there were twins, and while one opened doors with his right arm, the other closed them with his left.” (Alberto Magno)

[...] The series of jewels/doorhandles called “On The Doorway” by Beatrice Brovia and Nicolas Cheng looks at both meanings that the expression conversation piece has assumed throughout history: bourgeois painterly genre and instrument of sociality. The objects they have created transcend the common role or ornament for the body that the tradition of applied arts confers upon the jewel, and instead try to establish a dialogue with other everyday supports. The gaze of the two makers comes to rest upon elements of the domestic setting that have an intrinsic ornamental quality, a craftsmanship that is even vaguely precious, while boasting a precise function — in this case the handles and knobs on doors, devices whose function implicates, as for the jewel, interaction with the human body. [...]

Excerpt from the catalogue text by Michele D’Aurizio, 2011

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes: “The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open. But,” continues Bachelard, “then come the hours of greater imagining sensibility. On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges have been well oiled. And our fate becomes visible.” The door (and with it the knob that makes it function) is in fact the most rhetorical element present in a house: one passes, enters, exits through a door, crosses the threshold, penetrates another space with respect to that in which one is, these actions reflect the dialectic on which lies the ideology of the domestic space, or the relationship between opposites such as internal/external, public/private, familiar/uncanny, etc. Brovia and Cheng’s knob-jewels thus become conversation pieces for sounding the actuality of those dichotomies and therefore question the meanings that the concepts of house, domesticity, familiarity have assumed today. They themselves are “dialectic” objects: unite materials specific to domestic spaces (salt, copper, fabric, etc.) to others that are more precious, more akin to the jeweler’s art (ebony, silver, marble, jet, etc.), but without ever “betraying” the sensible properties of one or the other, thereby exalting intrinsic expressiveness: they are fragile and therefore precious objects, that are familiar, nonetheless, the way a jewel must be in the end.

Excerpt from On The Doorway exhibition catalogue, introduction text by Michele D’Aurizio.