Laura C. Vela, "Instructions to Build the House", (video still), 2020
Laura C. Vela, "How to be Home", 2020 and "Instructions to Build the House" (video), 2020
Beginning with the concept of home and the domestic space, the deck of cards presents photographs from my project Como la casa mía (2020). This photographic series features the performer Xirou Xiao and investigates intimacy, home, everyday gestures, and the feeling of belonging to a certain space. Currently, people are staying inside their homes for historic and unending amounts of time. The relationships people have with objects is in constant flux and this shift in environment has begun to make seemingly everyday objects hold new significance. Suddenly, these “things” have acquired an aesthetic and autonomous value that, before, went unnoticed. This deck of cards embraces this change. Keep them on a coffee table or build a classic house of cards. In understanding that the concept of “home’” has changed, I propose that “How to be Home” gives collectors the ability to construct their own, new domestic spaces. Art can serve to be a home.
The deck of cards is made-up of four suits: tangerines, jasmine, hearts, and shoes. Understand each suit as an indispensable part; one can play without shoes, or without a heart, but it will no longer be the same game.
Before starting the game, one should: wash your hands and wash your eyes. Forget about time. Be a participant in what is seen and what was seen. Mix all the cards, with a little care and a bit of luck.
There are several ways to place the cards: the best is with patience. Thus, you can build a house with many floors from a single deck.
Most of the time we go fast, without thinking about the foundations, then everything falls down and we have to start over . . . and that’s OK! Take a deep breath and when you feel ready and start over. It happens to all of us at some point.
The house we live in may be large, small, with a single floor or many floors. Dark with nooks and crannies, or bright with large, open spaces. With a wooden floor that creaks when you walk or one of gleaming tiles. A home of your own or an inherited one, in passing or forever. The house we build, the one we are, may be the place where we begin to have our own name, where we begin to keep secrets or where we begin to dream.
Laura C. Vela (b. 1993, Madrid) is a photographer and audiovisual artist. Her work focuses on the ordinary, the infinitesimal, and how people interact with their surroundings. For her, creativity is a way of finding her place in the world, of being with others. Her work has been exhibited in Spain and abroad; and she has given workshops and talks in various cultural circles. From time to time, her work also includes curatorial and publishing projects.
Vela published her first book, Vorhandenheit, in 2014. In 2016 she contributed to Subculturcide, a book about Madrid in the 2010s. She was a selected artist at Plat(t)form Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2018, and in May 2019 her book Como la casa mía / Like My Own House was published by Dalpine. In July 2020, La Mirada Creadora Editorial published a new edition of Vorhandenheit.