Zilla Leutenegger (b. 1968) works with installations at the interface of drawing, sculpture and video. Her works turn on the relationship between humans and space. The six site-specific installations she created for OUR HOUSE include a completely new production made specifically for what used to be the master’s study.

What are your exhibited works all about?
They are about who lives here. Are we really alone when we come to visit?

What interests you about housing?
What does it mean for a residential building to become a museum?

How might we live in future?
The kind of home in which we each feel comfortable is bound to be highly individual. But one aspect that is undoubtedly true of all cultures is the need to feel safe.

Jakob Sturm (b. 1966) is an artist, author and curator with a particular interest in the production of spaces.

What is your exhibited work all about?
It is about how we live and how we want to live. This question is of fundamental concern to us all and to society as a whole – perhaps more than almost anything else in art.

What interests you about housing?
That it is at once both private and political. One constant of my work is the creation of “places of possible habitation” both in reality and in art, since to me, there is not much difference between the two. As I see it, the question of how we live begins with how we relate to each other and to things, and how we share space.

How might we live in future?
Hopefully in a way that our interactions with space and things are constantly opening up new possibilities and becoming less and less constricting, both politically and socially; and in a way that our sharing of space and our housing preferences no longer depend on economic parameters.

Born in Stettin in 1931, Inge Werth launched her career as a photographer in Frankfurt in 1963. She ranks alongside Barbara Klemm, Abisag Tüllmann and Erika Sulzer-Kleinemeier as one of the key eye-witness photographers of the revolts of 1968. She also observed and photographed the mounting protests against property speculation and high rents of the early 1970s as well as photographing the first occupied houses in Frankfurt’s West End. Werth’s focus as a photographer was always on the needs and living conditions of the people she photographed and the quality of their abodes.

Werth began her Im Bett series in the 1970s and worked on it for several decades. The series came about almost by chance. She had been working on a project about rural life that had also entailed capturing people in their most personal space, i.e. in their bedrooms. The subject so captivated her that she began visiting families, couples, men, women and people young and old from all social classes and all walks of life and using her camera to record the variety, the peculiarities and the personal touches that characterise every home, the purest expression of which she invariably found in that most private of all rooms, the bedroom. What interested her was always the inhabitants themselves and the questions: How do these people live? What do they surround themselves with? What are the memories they cherish most?

This room shows a selection of images from the Im Bett series as well as three photographs that Inge Werth has taken within the past few years in the senior citizens’ home in which she now lives.

Matthias Weischer (b. 1973) is a painter and draughtsman. He is interested in living space as an interior and as a performance space that he can constantly restage.

What are your exhibited works all about?
This room is both motif and studio rolled into one; it is a model that I am actively working on and that I am constantly changing. Here, I observe, arrange, draw and paint. The room is separated from infinite space, yet for all its limitations offers unlimited possibilities. This is the first time I have gone public with this practice of working with a playable space outside my own studio.

What interests you about housing?
To inhabit a space means to adapt it and shape it. It follows that where a person lives is bound to be an expression of an individual, subject to external constraints and that person’s own possibilities. Housing is a fundamental need and engenders security. Having said that, any space can accommodate an arrangement of interest to me, whether or not it is secure. The factors that matter are often quite basic: What is the fall of light? How are the objects spaced and how do they relate to each other? Space is a universal language that I am constantly parsing anew… as is anyone who inhabits a space.

How might we live in future?
Our needs will not change, I believe, though external pressures and the need to adapt to changing conditions will inevitably result in differents forms of habitation. Climate change, digitalization and scarcity of resources will undoubtedly play a role. But housing is a cultural phenomenon that is evolving all the time and that changes only gradually. So there will still be chairs, cupboards, beds and pictures on the walls – that much seems certain.

Susanne Kutter (b. 1971) is a multimedia artist who is interested in the precarious relationship between nature and culture. The loss of certainties now threatening us also informs her engagement with living space.

What is your exhibited work all about?
It is about the destruction of space, the loss of security and continuity and perhaps even the dissolution of the conventional order. But it is also about the round and the angular and how illusions are generated.

What interests you about housing?
Many creatures build themselves a nest, a lair or an underground burrow. Shaping space to make it habitable is not a behaviour exclusive to Homo sapiens. But there are additional factors that play a crucial role in the creation of human dwellings – factors such as power, status, social exclusion.

How might we live in future?
Who will have how much space at their disposal? The distribution of living space reflects the perverse, capitalistic power structures underpinning our society. The right to living space is not a human right. So my answer to the question of how we might live in future is that having sufficient living space at our disposal should be declared a universal human right.

Jana Sophia Nolle (b. 1986) works at the interface of conceptual photography, installations and artistic research. Her work Blue Blanket was created specially for the OUR HOUSE exhibition. The title is a reference to the blue blankets used by homeless people that are a frequent sight in Frankfurt.

What is your exhibited work all about?
Blue Blanket shows a fictional living room of a well-to-do Frankfurt resident. It is a synthesis of photos of Frankfurt living rooms taken for research purposes. Inside this living room is a reconstruction of a homeless shelter of Frankfurt sleeping places. The work addresses the ever widening gap between rich and poor in Frankfurt, and taking housing as an example, examines the far-reaching socio-political changes currently taking place there, including the dynamics of gentrification and marginalization.

What interests you about housing?
At a time of growing social inequality, I have chosen to address people’s existential need for shelter and safety and the relevance of people’s actual living conditions to the wider issue of social justice. In terms of both form and content, my works take place in public and in private. They open up alternative spaces such as footpaths and living rooms as platforms on which the definition and influential scope of the public and private spheres can be negotiated.

How might we live in future?
Growing cities, increasingly limited living space and climate change all call for a complex rethink to which city planners, architects, designers, policymakers and others should take an interdisciplinary approach. Housing, and construction generally, should be sustainable, energy-efficient and carbon-neutral. The interiors of buildings could be designed so as to be multi-functional, making it easier for them to be repurposed. Autonomous communal housing could become a more readily available option and private ownership scaled back. At the political level, it is important to create more affordable housing and that our living spaces focus on people as well as on nature.

Elizabeth Ravn (b. 1994) creates paintings in which she devotes herself to the humdrum, the private, the seemingly incidental. Her works capture fleeting moments in much the same way as snapshots.

What are your exhibited works all about?
The works are from a series I produced while confined to my apartment during the first COVID lockdown in 2020. Started spontaneously in an effort to preoccupy myself, the series has become a record of my place in uncertain times.

What interests you about housing?
Housing is a recurring consideration in my work, as a context for the everyday and as a representation of precarity and transformation. Dwelling in cities, I encounter inspiring heterogeneity in housing, while also being constantly confronted by the exploitation of housing for profit.

How might we live in future?
After recent years of pandemic-induced home time, we could live with a more sincere appreciation of housing. We could make housing more accessible to all, rather than speculating, destroying, or displacing people from their homes.

The photographer Karolina Horner (b. 1980) lives and works in Vienna. In 2020 she recorded the lives of various families there during the COVID lockdown.

What are your exhibited works all about?
The first COVID lockdown imposed in March/April 2020 brought ordinary life to a standstill literally overnight. Suddenly, everyone’s lives were confined to their own four walls. For me this meant that I was no longer allowed to follow the lives of the families I had been following as a photographer. To cope better with the uncertain and unsettling state of being locked up at home, and to continue taking photographs, I decided to use the computer to record the lives of families now forced to do everything within their own four walls. We met on Zoom, when I would ask the family members to congregate in one room and there do something representative of their everyday lives during lockdown. I then photographed them doing it without having to leave my own four walls.

What interests you about housing?
I’m interested in how families organise their home life, the rituals they develop and how these rituals changed as a result of their living on top of each other during the pandemic, or rather the lockdown.

How might we live in future?
I would like to see children and families living in a way that makes them feel safe and secure. I would like children to experience the home as a kind of nest in which they can grow up in safety and experience magic in their everyday lives as they slowly but surely advance towards adulthood. Sadly, this is still beyond the reach of far too many children and families.

Robert Haas (Vienna 1898 – New York 1997) was an Austrian-American photographer. Having won recognition as a typographer in the 1920s, he served an apprenticeship with the Viennese photographer Trude Fleischmann before embarking on a career in photojournalism. The 1930s saw him produce numerous photo-essays on everyday life and social issues. Haas was Jewish and escaped Austria only by the skin of his teeth in 1938. He fled first to England and then to the USA, where he launched his second career as a graphic designer and printer, though he never gave up photography.
Robert Haas’s photographic estate was made over to the Wien Museum in 2015. There it was found to contain numerous interior views of the homes of Jewish residents of Vienna who had been forced to flee Austria following its annexation by Nazi Germany in 1937–38.

The reproductions of the photographs exhibited in this room show the abandoned homes of five Jewish families and individuals, who commissioned Haas to produce a visual record of their former homes. Three of the commissions were executed on the same day and are dated June 1938, when Haas himself was preparing to flee. He left Austria for good in September of that year.

Further reading:
Frauke Kreutler & Gerhard Milchram, “Zum Andenken verewigt. Wiener Wohnungen 1938,” in Wien Museum Magazin, 2019.
https://magazin.wienmuseum.at/wiener-wohnungen-1938

The situation for the Jewish photographer Robert Haas became even more perilous when Nazi troops marched into Austria in March 1938 and annexed it to Nazi Germany: “As you know,” he wrote to a friend in the USA in April 1938, “I will not be able to remain here and I’m already pulling all the strings I can to get out.” The persecution, deportation and murder of the Jews of Vienna between 1938 and 1942 led to 70,000 homes becoming “vacant.” Most of these were allocated to loyal Nazis. Some Jews who were already living in exile commissioned Haas to photograph their abandoned homes for them, presumably as a memento, but perhaps also to have a record of the property they had lost.
Louise Stern’s letter to Haas of 28 May 1938, for example, contains detailed instructions on what to photograph: “Dear Mr. Haas, In my amateurish way, I’ve drawn up a list of the things I would like to have memorialised.” Stern goes on to describe the rooms and furnishings that she wants to have photographed: “Small hall (downstairs) display cabinet with Tyrolean chairs, stove (illuminated, though it also looks good from the stairs). The suite of red chairs (if the lamp is in the way, please move it) with the plates on the wall and the banisters (a favourite view of mine.)” Haas photographed the Sterns’ apartment according to his client’s instructions on 8th June. He had to work clandestinely in order not to attract the notice of the neighbours, who might otherwise have alerted the Gestapo. Whether Louise Stern ever received the photographs is not known. She took her own life in Prague in 1939. Her husband Gustav survived the Shoah.

The photographs of Francisca Gómez (b. 1981) record an experiment conducted on herself. In 2015, Gómez reconstructed the kind of emergency shelter provided for refugees arriving in Germany and, after furnishing it with the bare necessities, lived there herself before letting a friend of hers, who had fled from Syria with just a few personal possessions, “move in” for a few days.

What is your exhibited work all about?
Can any architectural structure be made habitable – and should it? Which things do we really need or should we be allowed to keep when space is limited? The average refugee arriving in Germany at the end of 2015 was allotted 3.5 m2 living space.

What interests you about housing?
I understand dwellings as social corpuses, as a kind of second skin that also functions as a dividing line between social status and individual action. Housing is an existential need, which is why it speaks volumes about the health of a society.

How might we live in future?
Housing is one of the most pressing problems of the present. To be able to make meaningful changes to it, we first have to get to grips with the deep-seated question of private property and wealth distribution.