In the summer of 2020, a group of twelve architects took part in a week-long artistic residency, during which they were accommodated in individual rooms of a dilapidated house on a small island in the Venetian Lagoon: one per room, in complete solitude.
The house was almost an exact replica of what was previously considered an unrealized project by American architect John Hejduk: The House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate.
The replica of The House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate, built in the 1970s on a private island by Countess di Tesserata—without Hejduk's knowledge—was in imminent danger of demolition because the new owners wanted to replace it with a luxury glamping resort. However, the creators of the Unfolding Pavilion project agreed with the owners on a contract that allowed temporary occupation of the house for the purpose of realizing twelve site-specific installations as part of a week-long art residency there. The only condition was that the outcome of the project would remain secret until the house was demolished. The agreement was honored and the project proceeded as planned; unfortunately, the house was demolished in December 2020.
The remarkable story of John Hejduk's replica of the House for a Man Who Refused to Participate is at the heart of Rituals of Solitude, a three-act transmedia exhibition curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando. It was first presented at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.
The traveling exhibition Rituals of Solitude, conceived during the global lockdown, explores the spread of fake news, the reversal of the traditional relationship between private and public space, the paradoxical rituals with which homes are populated, the ways in which visual technologies are domesticated into tools of self-presentation and connection, the accumulation, fetishization, and display of objects in home interiors; and, in addition, the states of loneliness that arise as a result of forced isolation.
