Occupy

An apartment in a quiet area, large enough, bright, comfortable. Spaces suited to a serene family life, rationally assigned to their functions, in a simple way without redundancies, a place for everything and everything in its place. Three children, two teenagers and one aged 9. As its inhabitants grow, the house gradually adapts. The spaces are first optimized, then expanded. Under-used places become more and more used, new furnishings arrive, more places for new things, a place for every new thing. At first the house seems like the one from before, only more lived-in, more alive. But then small transformations appear, at first imperceptible, banal disturbances of order due to the daily activity of the house’s new inhabitants. At a first distracted glance it might seem like just a bit of disorder caused by some object out of place. Little by little the small transformations become ever more present, ever more unexpected, ever more invasive. You delude yourself that nothing has changed yet, it is only a matter of time, there is not always the time to put everything back in place. But no. An eye external to the daily life of the house perceives them at once. They are small signs, but they are clearly the signals of a genuine alien invasion. An invasion that spares no place and no room, made up of many, very many small elements scattered untidily here and there in every wardrobe, drawer, wall, floor. There is no longer a place for everything, and everything, as if in reaction, seeks a new place. The objects seem endowed with their own aesthetic sense, but a surreal aesthetic, that overturns the function you had planned for the spaces. When you least expect it, and almost always evoked by the arrival of some guest, there appears a toy in the cutlery drawer, a shoe under the sideboard, a sticker among the sofa cushions. The rows of stemmed glasses lined up in the cabinet suddenly become rows of trees lining the road ideally travelled by a toy car. The coarse salt fallen on the pantry becomes a mountain trench to climb and conquer. Beside the living-room windows, toy planes whizz by, cleaving the skies above the sofas now turned into elastic trampolines for circus games. Behind the doors, Indian sentinels may hide, and through the door frames one glimpses the rifle barrels of lurking snipers. The inhabitants of the house do not really take much notice, but an external and impartial eye like that of the camera sees the invasion perfectly well.