Darie DUP. Reflections around a found home

Reflections around a found house

In March 2011, the sculptor Dup Darie revealed to me a series of photographs immortalizing architectures and characters in diverse places: from London's most exclusive neighborhoods - the West End and Westminster - to poor but crowded places in India. Some revealed eerily beautiful desert landscapes taken on the arid terrain of a Greek island. Browsing through the album, I stopped at a photograph of a traditional thatched house in the Arges Valley. The qualities of this image can touch several sensibilities:

1. architectural - the structure of the house hints at an archaic mode of construction, 2. anthropological - the found object is a testimony to a largely forgotten rural everyday life, 3. sculptural - the crumbling roof alters the meaning of the original dwelling, turning it into a subject of reflection, 4. photographic - the mirroring of a real object includes the testimony of its own disappearance.

Read the full text in the printed edition of Arhitectura magazine, issue 1/2011