Performative Insertions

Performative insertions are easily and temporary assembled additions to interiors in the form of screens, modules, and units that can transform the home and accommodate the evolving needs of occupants. Experimental mises en scène, they characterise emerging social and cultural roles that differ from the planned domestic roles embodied in the sites where they are inserted. While performative insertions are designed by architects and artists and are therefore not unplanned, they critique the planned domesticity that in the Western world has traditionally defined the home as a permanent, static dwelling for the nuclear family. Theatrical and expressive, performative insertions demonstrate alternative ways of living. The following essay examines a collection of performative insertions from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, foregrounding their critique of the planned domesticity of their time. On one hand, earlier insertions critique the fixity of rooms in the home and their differentiated, gendered uses. They disrupt this planned domesticity by embodying newly modern and universal values: adaptability, mobility, efficiency, and hygiene. On the other hand, later insertions expand these critiques to question the planned permanence of the home and the social composition of the nuclear family. Their disruption embodies dwellings for people who share homes beyond the nuclear family: the homeless and urban dwellers on the move. Through their design, they bring up contemporary issues of precarity and marginalisation. Beyond their demonstrative nature as prototypes, the analysis sheds light on their capacity for replicability. Some of the twentieth century cases did, in fact, go on to transform standard Western housing. The implementation and impact of the twenty-first-century cases, however, remain mediated by their experimental nature, leaving the question open as to whether they can foster new forms of community that go beyond the nuclear family, and that are detached from the permanence of the family home.