prosthetic homes

Houses. They are the machines we live in, but they are also the machines we dream in. Not only do they cater to our everyday existence but they are also vehicles through which we become more than what we are. They are the clothes we wear to ‘become’’ someone who we want to be- that ideal person whose persona we want to inhabit. Homes are the vehicles for our dreams. Embedded within the way we make them are idealizations- utopian apparitions without tangibility. They are the ghosts from an ideal future we imagine for ourselves.

We could, if we choose, to dismiss these are merely seductive mirages – untruthful and therefore dangerous. But without them what do we have? Are these mirages untrue or do they instead represent for us something very real- something that we feel everyday constantly and want to transform, to change?

It is unfortunate when in the city the home is merely seen as a result of the compulsions of efficiency. More people in less area makes economic sense. Governmental and non governmental agencies bend over backwards to prove the logic of density and economy. The home is merely a unit within this humongous spreadsheet. Where then lie love, desire, longing, eroticism, loss? Or are these only meant for those who can afford them? Without these aren’t we all lost?

The mediation with desire can only happen through what we can shape in the tangible. There is a ‘here and now’ to desire and can be found in the objects we make, the systems we put in place, the ideologies we espouse.

Architecture is one such artifact. Clumsy, heavy, expensive and permanent. In the shaping of it we make ourselves anew. The relationship between these tangible concrete objects and the ephemeral space of desire is far from easy. They affect each other constantly in a flux of movements and eddies. To read architecture is to be able to navigate these waters and make them legible.

The home has often been looked at as a refuge from the outside. It is supposed to imagine the outside threatening. But in the city perhaps we need to relook at this imagination. Is the house merely a reaction to the dangers that the city poses or is it also a way to navigate the city. Does it also make its own city in the way it chooses to engage with it. In between the ‘home’- and when I say this- it is not only the single family home I speak of- but also all spaces where we define oneness outside of the public- where domain is defined within which a comfort is imagined whether that is of a Community, neighbourhood. Locality, religion, caste, work. The relationship that each makes with the ‘other’ is what defines the home.

Let us perhaps examine how we live. It seems like although sometimes we let this game of numbers defeat us, more often we resist. Our desires pull us out of the grid and make us transform it, break it, reconfigure it. In these deviations we make our space with our colonization. An invasion that breaks the boundaries of an imposed order, the house is a place for freedom.

We play out our freedom out through our bodies. Houses might be something we wear- prostheses - to complete our incomplete selves. This incompleteness is perpetual in a city where stability is non-existent. What if the home – that ideal of repose – was never stationary but in fact perpetually moving and shifting- a dynamic conception that evolves as our relationship with the city evolves. The home as prosthesis helps us inscribe our identities in the city.

Prosthetics can be permanent or temporary. As far as prosthetics go they are worn as much to enable an act, (like scissors that transform the hand into a cutting device) or to play-act like the fake teeth worn for giving a friend a scare. In that sense they can be serve both a utlilitarian and an oneiric function. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. To be able to excavate the imagination of the home then it is imperative to look closely around us, to turn a fine eye towards the way in which we arrange our furniture, the knick-knacks we keep on our showcases, the way In which we use the home. In these objects, in their form, the references they make, the languages they speak lie our homes.

There is no simple arithmetical relationship between desire and architecture. The map is complex and the excavation of these vectors would need different tools. Psychoanalysis’s uses indirect tools and methods to reach into our subconscious and pull these out. Ink blot tests, Rorschach tests, the state of hypnosis, dreams allow us to access what lies beneath. The work of the surrealists explored these to uncover the truth. Perhaps there are many clues here for us to understand the home as prosthetics that we wear to reconstruct ourselves.

Prosthetic homes are messily assembled around us using everything we can get our hands on. As our resources and our relationship with the city transform so do these assemblages.

When a migrant enters the city the home is for him only a foothold- a place to sleep at night, he finds a home in interstices or in arrangements that do not strain his resources but provide him with the basic needs through which he finds place in the city. Sometimes these are resources that are shared with many like him- shared beds, cooking arrangements. Informal systems are wedged into the formal structure of city. Let us also look at the spaces where there recent migrants are provided space – the hostel space for young men who come to the city from small towns where every room has in it fragments of the home town and the position of the mirror on the wall is the first image he sees everyday of himself in the city. 

This relationship with the idea of dwelling changes as he becomes acclimatized to the throng of the urban. The space transforms from being merely a resting place at night to also being a resource to earn some money. A shop is opened up if the home is on a main road, or is subdivided and sublet; the space of the home also becomes at certain times of the day a workspace- embroidery, the making of papads. These conflations of living and work are not contradictions- they don’t exist as different.

Perhaps here it is important to note that it would be futile to reduce the complexity of the act of making to merely the staking of a claim in the city by those who belong to the fringes of society. The transformation of the ocean into a sea view, or of the home into a designer showpiece is also a relationship that has been made. It is still a prostheses worn around the body to replace missing limbs or to enable an action. 

The assemblage of the home thus helps us transform the city into what we want it to be. Nature, other people and communities are let in forms that are carefully strategised. our relationships with the other are shaped by the way we make our homes. This making is propelled by desire. By helping us construct our relationships with the world- known and unknown.. the universe / nature / mankind / civilization it allows us to ‘become’.