“Home” is not a stable container. Not long ago, manual labor cohabited with eating, sleeping, copulating — in short, with reproduction. The home, as we know it, was invented alongside wage labor. Defined in opposition to the factory, it offered respite for the male worker, a sense that the workday had an end, and a quasi-labourer of his own in the form of a wife. Today, it might seem that the we’ve come full circle, as WFH has rapidly transformed from a privilege of certain classes to an epidemiological mandate enforced by the state. But this circle is a charade: the home was never not a workplace. It’s a spatiotemporal fiction that served as the enabling condition for industrial capitalism by rendering invisible the work performed within it. In the contemporary era, the political economy of the home has transformed alongside work, while the constellation of meanings attached to domestic space have largely endured. Through a wide-range of case studies, from online sex work to drone warfare, this talk will explore some of the ways these semantic associations are put to use today, as well as the unintended consequences of their deployment and, perhaps, their potential for politicization.
Nicholas Korody is a writer, designer, and researcher from Los Angeles, currently based in Milan. He is the cofounder of Adjustments Agency and works independently as Interiors Agency. He is the author of The Uses of Decorating, a collection of four essays on the political economy of amateur home decorating, which was translated into Spanish and published in Madrid in 2020, and formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of the architecture magazine Ed. His writing has been featured in publications such as 032c, Pin-Up, Harvard Design Magazine, Metropolis, and e-flux, while his visual work has been exhibited at institutions internationally, including Swiss Institute in New York, Triennale di Milan, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
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