Casa Esquiça (9/10)

In the Casa Esquiça, play is a full-time profession—and the most serious thing in life.

Each plank that forms it is a kind of body, with 9/10 orifices that connect it to others and to the wider world. Through them, it breathes, looks, listens, smells, eats, speaks, shouts, whispers, touches, crashes, feels, desires, gives birth and brings light, as a gift to those who linger within.

It’s a house where the collective becomes the body, where each person is many, depending on the bonds of affection they’re able to create between themselves and those they encounter. We all are in it. It’s a translation of our bodily gestures into a relational space—a place to realign with our own body, with the bodies of others, and to cosmically make the world our own.

What kind of house is this?

It’s a joyful house, born of animal, vegetal, and mineral origin, with cooperative organs whose sculptural identity surpasses the f-utility of programmatic and performative gender.

It exists fictionally, as a performative play-thing. It forges connections and wonder. Each of its faces breathes and expresses mixed forms of Being-Human, ready to converse with those who draw near its social networks and walls, full of holes—its doors and windows constellate it like the apertures of camera obscurae.

Here, words flit from one side to the other, flying in and out joyfully, nesting in the imagination of anyone drawn to it. It’s a Book of Sand that weighs the body’s presence in the world. It is a body-dazzling house—a reflection of the childhood urge to play house.

We are house-dreamers. Since caves, we’ve collected houses within us, one inside the other. We are entire settlements, bearers of aesthetic allegories and joys.

Based on a series of “sketches” made to fit the individual orifices of the body-planks that shape it, Os Espacialistas present a set of i-mediations and i-measurements of real and imaginary intensities between the body that plays with the house and its sketch-marked sides, measured in palms, feet, fathoms, legs, cubits, inches, and rods.

To sketch is to pierce, peek, desire, and draw the world.

The esquiça is the cylindrical plug that seals the hole: the negative void of the form of life where pure sensation, imagination, and time spill out; the anatomical foramen through which the cords of muscle, vessels, and nerves of our house-body pass.

The esquiça is a stick, a cylinder, a core, a cork, a stopper, a string, a tube, a duct, a finger, an arm, a leg, a face, a coin. The i-material positive of the world

The Casa Esquiça has its eyes set on the sky—it anticipates the chloroplastic and topological nature of the world.

It’s a poetic device for bodily closeness, satisfying our primal urge to see poetically into the interior of things. In it, we can look through ourselves: we just need to choose which side of the body we see from, what looks at us, what reconnects and re-reads us continuously.