A Room You May Have Missed – Jessica Freeman-Attwood

The mysterious door, which has adorned the Shoreditch Arts Club homepage in the lead up to our opening was created in 2018, as a collaboration between artist Amalia Laurent, architect Delphine Roque, and photographer Fabien Silvestre Suzor.  

As we open, we are happy to publish Jessica Freeman-Attwood’s articulation of the origin story, which resonates with ideologies of the Shoreditch Arts Club.

Artist Amalia Laurent and architect Delphine Roque reimagined the space of their house with a vivid red tent that envelops the stairwell. At once intimate and expansive, this nomadic structure feels as disorientating as it does playful and protective.

In The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard examines how the familiar realm of the home accommodates the dreamer’s consciousness:

‘The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’

Reconsidering the very conception of the home, A Room You May Have Missed entices the dreamer to explore a site where the ordinary and the unexpected become indistinguishable. It is not by chance that Sigmund Freud places the home (‘heim’) at the core of his theory of the uncanny (‘unheimlich’). Here, the ‘heimlich’ – defined by Freud as ‘arousing a sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within the four walls of his house’ – is disrupted by the unfamiliar.  

‘In the beginning we sought to clad ourselves’ wrote Adolf Loos in 1898, describing fabric as the first architectural feature, which acted as a second skin before the invention of walls.

Originally built as a refuge to provide shelter, the tent is among the oldest of human dwellings; with it came the notion of an inside and an outside.

Responding to the basic need for warmth and protection, Laurent and Roque’s tent is a Bachelardian cocoon where we may retreat to dream.

Piero Della Francesca’s The Dream of Constantine comes to mind where an angel visits Emperor Constantine in a fairytale, rose coloured, cone-topped tent. This is the instinct that drives children to create makeshift tents out of bed sheets, temporary sanctuaries where they can escape into imaginary worlds and travel to unknown lands. 

The ephemeral architecture in A Room You May Have Missed is partly inspired by the monumental 16th century indigo cloths, painted with scenes of Christ’s Passion, that would form a temporary chapel during Holy Week inside the Benedictine Abbey Church of San Nicolo del Boschetto in Genoa. Just as these cloths would form a sacred enclosure within the church, masking the walls, ceiling and altar, so Laurent and Roque’s contemporary iteration creates a cosmic cathedral-like space, but here awaiting our own imaginary projections. 

‘Question your teaspoons’ is Georges Perec’s call to arms in his Species of Space (1974) where he urges us to free ourselves from the shackles of quotidian habit that blind us to the possibilities of the space we call home.

At 9A Crofton Road, the site of the original exhibition, function is subverted: there are no more bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens; all evidence of human occupation has been erased; doors and windows exist, but not as we previously knew them. The arched windows and doors are simulated on translucent white fabric, yet resolutely denied of their original function as openings onto other spaces. In an Alice in Wonderland distortion of scale, these trompe l’oeil representations are printed slightly larger or smaller than we expect, unnerving us in their dislocation of the familiar. 

Perec recounts his struggles to imagine a room without a use, as he attempts to banish habitual functions and rhythms from his mind, to go beyond what he calls ‘this improbable limit.’

His efforts to conjure purposeless inhabited spaces lead him to ponder MC Escher’s labyrinthine engravings and René Magritte’s surrealist paintings of interiors. Finally, he resorts to his own fantasies: ‘I thought of the dreams I had had on this very subject, discovering a room I didn't know about in my own apartment.’ 

A similar vision is materialised in the exhibition where through an interstice the viewer discovers an imaginary garden. On the far side of the room, we see a red rectangle of fabric, attached to a painted canvas, like the backdrop in a stage set. It corresponds to the door that we perceive has concealed this secret realm, suggesting a surreal extension of space. The threshold of the open door leading to this hidden space frames the intersection between one reality and another. The objects in the garden are immediately recognisable as plants and leaves, yet partially coated in hues of blue, green and pink. Are they in fact artificial, fictional objects?

Nature and ornament, the real and the imaginary dissolve into one another as they spill over the bounds of the canvas and into the space itself.  

All images © Fabien Silvestre Suzor.