Rochelle Costi | A casa como laboratório: curated by Alexia Tala

How can we learn to see again what lies before our eyes every day? How can we restore depth, mystery and complexity to what we have learned to take for granted? These questions run through the work of Rochelle Costi (1961-2022), one of the most singular artists in contemporary Brazilian photography. Her gaze, charged with humour, irony and sensitivity, has always dismantled the visual and affective hierarchies of the everyday, showing that in the domestic space, in minimal objects and apparently trivial gestures, an exuberant life pulses, full of history and creative possibilities.

In the exhibition The House as a Laboratory, I propose that we talk about rooms, objects and pastimes, and that we approach Rochelle Costi's work from a notion that belongs to the French writer Georges Perec: the infra-ordinary. In his short text ‘Approximations to the infra-ordinary’, Perec asks himself: ‘What happens when nothing happens? How can we speak of those hours, those days when nothing happens, when nothing happens but what happens every day, the usual, the everyday, the obvious, the commonplace, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the everyday? [1]’ For Perec, the infra-ordinary is that which constitutes the real fabric of our lives: not the great events, but the whisper of the usual, the trace of the minimum. Yet we have made it invisible, because we take it for granted, because we incorporate it into our routine almost automatically. The poetic gesture - for both Perec and Costi - consists in de-automatising perception, in re-appropriating our everyday life, in making the familiar strange and thus recovering the power of amazement.

Passatempo (2018) introduces a key dimension of Costi's practice: the relationship with time. This artwork reflects on the idea of leisure, of suspended time, of doing without purpose or even of not doing (if it exists). Each of the images she produced during her lifetime suggests a pause in the flow of everyday life, an interstice where time dilates. Here the infra-ordinary acquires a temporal dimension: the ‘lost’ time that, in fact, makes up an essential part of the experience of inhabiting. As studies from neuroscience and contemporary philosophy have pointed out, it is in moments of leisure - rather than in moments of constant productivity - that spaces for discovery, imagination and creation open up. In Costi, to observe is not only to see, but to stop, and to inhabit the slow time of the domestic.

Rochelle Costi was, in this sense, an artist of the infra-ordinary. Throughout her long and fruitful career, she avoided spectacular subjects or grandiloquent settings, preferring to explore rooms, furniture, wardrobes, common objects, forgotten corners, insects, walls, patterns, textures, cheap shops and even fairground stalls. I had the opportunity to visit Chichicastenango in Guatemala with her, where the fairground stalls were one after the other overflowing with perfectly ordered piles of huipiles [2], loom-made blankets and handicrafts. Rochelle fed off this abundance; in fact, it was these visits that triggered the creation of her work Accounting (2016). About this work, the artist herself says in an on-line conversation with the artist Mateo López: ‘It's called Accounting because everything was numbered, all the items that were in the photos were numbered, like an arrangement of accounts that goes beyond numbers, of how many things there are, but of outstanding bills in general, of ancestry, of all the movements that this brings to us today. How many signs and movements there are in a huipil, how many times it has been made before, in other generations, above all, the permanence of it, how it (the tradition) remains until today and what stories it brings[3]’.  Although this series does not directly address the domestic space, the link with material memory, the symbolic order of objects and their capacity to preserve ancestral gestures dialogues with the logic of inhabiting that runs through her work. During that trip I could perceive that Rochelle did not look from the outside, nor from above, but from the inside, with patient and meticulous attention, as if she wanted to learn to look at the world for the first time. In her work, the house appears as a privileged setting: not only as a refuge, but also as a laboratory of wonder, of discoveries and dazzle, as an intimate geography where affections, tensions and memories take shape.

In the series Quartos - São Paulo (1998), Costi made a visual inventory of rooms in different houses in São Paulo. The artist photographed beds, wardrobes, desks, accumulations of objects, allowing each image to function as a kind of ‘indirect portrait’ of those who inhabit these spaces. This gesture connects deeply with Georges Perec's literary project in Life: User’s Manual, where he describes, room by room, an imaginary Parisian building, dwelling on its inhabitants, on the objects that surround them, on gestures, on tiny stories and everyday rituals.

In both works, artistic and literary, accumulation is not mere excess, but method: it is about cataloguing the multiple in order to capture the richness of the apparently banal. Both of them build on a poetics of detail. In Costi, as in Perec, the domestic becomes a cartography of desire and memory, a terrain where the individual mingles with the collective, where every object and every corner tells a story - however fragmentary, incomplete or imagined.

Although Casa da Ilha (2015) and Quarto de Banho (2017) share a focus to uninhabited space, each series approaches it from different angles. Casa da Ilha consists of photographs taken inside a wooden model, built as a model of a rustic dwelling. These images refer to an idea of the house as an archetypal, almost allegorical symbol, where the reduced and scaled-down space suggests both shelter and artifice. In contrast, Quarto de Banho documents a real bathroom, without people, but carefully arranged, where decorative details take on visual prominence. In both cases, Costi works with silent spaces that nevertheless contain traces that allude to past or imminent presences. Although the formal strategies are different - one from modelled fiction, the other from staged documentation - both series invite attentive contemplation, where the apparently insignificant reveals its narrative power. As in Perec's texts, the visible becomes legible, and the apparently insignificant reveals its narrative power.

In the series Casa Cega (2002), Costi goes a step further and explores the disturbing dimension of the domestic space. The house, traditionally understood as a place of shelter and security, becomes here a blind body, a space that loses its usual coordinates, a labyrinth where the familiar becomes alien, where no contact can be established from the inside to the outside or vice versa. In this series the Freudian notion of the sinister (Das Unheimliche) resonates, what should be intimate and trustworthy suddenly reveals its threatening reverse side. Costi reminds us that the infra-ordinary is not necessarily calm or gentle: it can also be unsettling, disturbing and charged with dark latencies.

The series Desmedida (2009) delves into the relationship between the everyday and the arbitrary nature of our perceptual norms. Costi intervenes in domestic objects, multiplying them, stretching them, distorting them and placing them in relation to scaled spaces, until they lose their usual function. In this way, she underlines the artificial character of the categories that organise our everyday life. Here the infra-ordinary appears as an invisible system that structures the visible. By altering these codes, Costi brings down the viewer's expectations, forcing him to renegotiate his relationship with the material world, to discover unsuspected potential in the trivial.

In Costi's participation in the 2010 São Paulo Biennial, entitled Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar, curated by Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, the artist presented works such as Reunião (2010) and Pele (1997-2010), among others, both belonging to the Residência series. In these installations, Costi transforms the exhibition space into an extension of the domestic universe but crossed by a sense of estrangement. In Reunião, identical chairs of different sizes are grouped around a pillar of the building designed by Oscar Niemeyer, generating a visual choreography that disorients the spectator and transforms everyday furniture into an abstract and rhythmic form. Pele, a work that originated in the Projeto Parede at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), displays a kaleidoscopic visual pattern composed of photographs of chicken feet, a motif that deliberately tensions the boundaries between the decorative and the repulsive. Here, the infra-ordinary reaches its most expansive dimension: the simplest gestures and materials are rearranged until they become disconcerting, inviting the viewer to reconfigure his or her perception of space and the objects that inhabit it.

Casinha (2011, Lanterna Mágica series) revisits the figure of the house from a dreamlike register. Through translucent backlit images that evoke childhood, play and memory, Costi turns the little house into an archetype loaded with meanings. The house is no longer just a material space, but a receptacle of memories, of barely insinuated stories, a threshold between the real and the imaginary. It is a tribute to that intermediate zone where the infra-ordinary dwells: between gesture and symbol, or more specifically between object and evocation.

Another relevant crossover point is the fragmentary structure that both share. Life: User’s Manual follows a labyrinthine path through the flats of the Parisian building, jumping between spaces, characters and times, as if putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the everyday. In Casa Própria (1999), Costi creates small domestic architectures that the artist introduces into various public spaces in Mexico City, all of them made from found objects and materials, scraps of packaging or precarious materials. These improvised ‘houses’ allude to the instability of housing in the Latin American urban context and critique the utopia of the stable home. As in Desmedida, each piece is a fragment that, added to the others, composes a critical and poetic commentary on the home, consumption and social order.

Thus, the reference to Perec not only illuminates thematic affinities, but also a methodological affinity: both Costi and Perec work from the fragment, from the series, from the montage, to make visible what is normally hidden under the numbness of the everyday. Both teach us that to inhabit is not just to occupy a space, but to construct meaning from minimal gestures, sensitive dispositions and forms of attention.

A notable inflection within this constellation of works is the video Há Casas (2018), a short three-minute film that shifts the notion of “home” towards the symbolic, through the lens of ritual. Using her own footage from the Círio de Nazaré procession in Belém do Pará (2017), where devotees carry small wooden houses of various shapes and colours as offerings representing their desire for a home, and photographs taken in Jordão, Acre (2018), documenting actual dwellings built in Amazonian communities, Costi establishes a dialogue between representation and realisation. The editing reveals how the longing for a home is expressed both in ritual gestures and in the physical structures built after years of effort. The work begins and ends with circular shots of the artist’s personal spaces in São Paulo and Caxias do Sul, anchoring the piece in an autobiographical dimension. Há Casas thus becomes a visual meditation on the act of inhabiting: not merely having a place, but imagining and desiring it within a community.

From this perspective, Rochelle Costi’s work challenges us to understand the home not as a fixed or sentimental category, but as a perceptual and cultural structure in constant transformation. Her projects bring up how ways of inhabiting are shaped by social conventions, power relations, gestures of resistance and modes of imagination.

In times marked by acceleration, visual consumption and the constant search for the spectacular, Costi's work acquires a particular resonance. It reminds us that true wonder is not in the distant or the exceptional, but in the near, in the unnoticed. She invites us to slow down, to inhabit our spaces differently, to look again at what is in front of us. Like Georges Perec, Rochelle Costi teaches us that the trivial is in fact profoundly political, because it contains the structures that organise our lives and, at the same time, the interstices where we can resist and transform.

The exhibition The House as a Laboratory should not only be understood as a tribute exhibition to an exceptional artist, but also as an opportunity to highlight the relevance and depth of her gaze, but above all as an invitation to reconsider our ways of inhabiting the world. As if Rochelle Costi were telling us, from her visual archive, to enter our homes - and our ways of looking - with a renewed sensitivity, attentive to the power of the minimal, the fragile and the invisible. Because, as Costi and Perec teach us, wonder is not sought after: it is cultivated.