A House of Differences:
homemaking in displacement
homemaking in displacement
2024 - ongoing
with Qianer Zhu
In the winter of 2024, as soft resistance collective, we temporarily inhabited a vacant villa in Zurich, transforming its abandoned institutional rooms into domestic ones. Understanding “queerness” beyond sexuality but as a critique of power structures, we saw “displacement” not as a “one-off” or exceptional event but as a constant ongoing process (moving out of place) and condition (being out of place). For those queer bodies that are displaced because of their resistance to normative expectations, how can architecture support a sense of respite and inhabitation?
Starting from our own personal trajectories, and in conversation with historical and contemporary queer communes and individuals living in China, Italy, and the diaspora, we expanded onto home studies through drawings and oral histories. Focusing on those unspoken layers that are at the base of day-to-day practices of homemaking we began to define a practice of resistant homemaking, where the villa became the first iteration of an ongoing collective living experiment.
This process was documented in various formats, including the self-published fiction book ‘the queer beings and their friends’ and the multi-channel film a house of differences. First presented in an exhibition at ETH Zurich (16 December 2024 – 24 January 2025), it later lived various temporary iterations at Princeton University (15 April 2025), UPenn LGBT Center (18 April 2025), and AIA Center for Architecture (9–10 May 2025).
Starting from our own personal trajectories, and in conversation with historical and contemporary queer communes and individuals living in China, Italy, and the diaspora, we expanded onto home studies through drawings and oral histories. Focusing on those unspoken layers that are at the base of day-to-day practices of homemaking we began to define a practice of resistant homemaking, where the villa became the first iteration of an ongoing collective living experiment.
This process was documented in various formats, including the self-published fiction book ‘the queer beings and their friends’ and the multi-channel film a house of differences. First presented in an exhibition at ETH Zurich (16 December 2024 – 24 January 2025), it later lived various temporary iterations at Princeton University (15 April 2025), UPenn LGBT Center (18 April 2025), and AIA Center for Architecture (9–10 May 2025).
Images: © soft resistance collective