APQhome – MAAT
An archive of daily life #8
Ana Pérez-Quiroga

The installation APQhome – MAAT is a domestic environment in fourteen tones of blue, featuring a home, its objects and a garden within MAAT’s exhibition space. In this installation there is a total and vital need for a dialogue with others. There is also this “invisible work” of mine: it involves an artistic discourse that consenses through sociability, a personal energy that is mobilized towards a relationship with the others and is replenished by it.
The legitimation of APQhome – MAAT as an artistic project is ensured by me, in a partnership with the museum, and by the experiencers and visitors. This reinforces the meaning and value that I give to space and to the objects (both designed by me). I thus decree this installation in which art and life coexist and are performatized as the condition to experience the total work of art.
Negotiation: to me this notion has the same meaning as communication in a fully democratic and performatic act. In the scope of this installation I also use negotiation in the sense of an agreement between parties, with rules defined by me here and now, according to protocols that I have set while keeping a flexibility that allows for their negotiation with the participants (as “experiencers”) and the sponsors of this project.
Installation: I understand it as an artistic manifestation that encompasses life and, therefore, every, and any, three-dimensional space, including the dimension of time. From this standpoint, installation covers every aspect of the everyday, such as domestic life, and is activated by me and by the performativity of visitors and experiencers.
Performance: to me it is a weapon against convention, a pushing of the boundaries of art. Aside from the relationship that I establish with time, space, the experiencer and the visitor, which are a prerequisite to experience the total work of art, I also integrate other art forms, such as furniture and object design, photography, drawing, silkscreens, printmaking, film, video, sound and neon, which become performatic objects in the context of the installation.
Archive: I use this term in the sense of compilation, like a diary of events and everyday occurrences, an organizer of the real, a mapping of events that are built from facts, memories, choices, decisions and emotions. This compilation is fixed on a material support with a digital dimension. All Archives of Daily Life, from #1 to this one (#8), are ongoing, constantly updated performatic projects.
Daily life: I understand it as personal experiencing in my relationship with myself and with others, with situations, travels, and movement in time-space. Daily life as an opacity based on two fundamental aspects, one related to a practical side and the other giving it and aesthetical dimension, performatizing every action.
Home: I think of it as a space for my artistic affirmation. It is also a space for personal and political affirmation, namely of my feminist consciousness. It incorporates physical and emotional space, in which there is a confluence of memories, comfort, introspection, privacy, sociability, fears, anxieties, solitude, sex, love and domesticity.
Objects: I designed and personalized them so that they represent me in their singularity and aesthetics. These objects are contingent upon subjective conditions such as my education, culture and economic capability: there is no such thing as the “zero degree” of purchasing. The objects in APQhome – MAAT are a collection catalogued in categories and their common denominator is that they are all part of this installation. This collection of objects, and their cataloguing, is available in Portuguese and English at apqhome.anaperezquirogahome.com, which is an integral part of this project and portrays me as an element of a contemporary society intimately entangled with digital reality. On the website there are objects organized according to fourteen categories and listed as follows: Art, Books, Knick-Knack, Cooking / Serving, Textiles, Furniture, Lighting, Electrical Appliances, Stationary, Toiletries, Cleaning, Garden, Stones, and Transportation. Each object is accompanied by a caption identifying it and its price. The objects can be purchased, in a close connection to negotiation. A fusion between art and life, this total work of art is activated in four movements. The first activation movement is the setting up of an installation booking protocol akin to accommodation booking processes. I have stipulated two nights as the adequate time frame for experiencing, enjoying and understanding the installation by the experiencers, who can avail themselves to a “User’s Guide”, a script with suggestions for performatization. The second activation movement is the performance-lunch, during which the experiencer’s immersion necessarily follows a different protocol and in which my presence is the element that triggers the negotiation process established here, alongside a conversation about art. The third activation movement is the enjoyment by the visitors, who may manipulate some of the objects in the installation. Finally, the fourth activation movement takes place on the day of the Rentrée Party @ APQhome.
APQhome – MAAT is the space for my artistic affirmation as well as the space for my personal and political affirmation, namely of my feminist consciousness.