The art and architecture collective Casa Antillón has turned the IE University Creativity Center—located in the old Real Casa de la Moneda in Segovia—into an artistic installation. A reflection on domestic space, the exhibition transports us to a place we thought we were used to, but which the pandemic has revealed to be curiously unfamiliar. Through architectural design and installation, the IE University Creativity Center became a meeting place for dialogue and divergent thinking.
The old Real Casa de la Moneda de Segovia, with close cultural ties to the city and IE University, is hosting the exhibition “Domestic Fictions” from the art and architecture collective Casa Antillón, formed by four young architects representing a new generation of visual artists. In this initiative in Segovia, the young creators play with the limits of domestic space within the center’s own exhibition halls.
Under the coordination of IE University Campus Life, Casa Antillón has proposed an integral artistic installation that occupies much of the building. Simulating different domestic scenes, the collective have transformed the IE University Creativity Center into a “fictitious house” replete with mutant and transfigured objects to reveal an oneiric, magical, dreamlike—ultimately, imagined—home.
“Installation, design, art, and performance coexist in this space so that the visitor is enticed to reflect on the seemingly obvious relationships between the house and its objects, confronting a past moment of delirium in their own home and imagining new ways of perceiving a house and an exhibition,” observes the art collective.
“Domestic Fictions” is, in short, an interpretation of the home and its surroundings—its atmosphere, spaces, furniture and sensations—yet in a completely unfamiliar way. “The goal was to invite visitors to look at the domestic meaning of a home from a new angle, as though in a dream. As people embrace these tangible and intangible characteristics, the exhibition becomes the translation of these elements into a strange, surreal dream dispersed throughout the different spaces of the IE Creativity Center,” says Creativity Center Director Juan Carlos Redondo.
Casa Antillón is an architecture and art studio that approaches the architectonic with experiential exhibitions, events and the curatorship of new, emerging art. It is the brainchild of four young architects: Emmanuel Álvarez, Marta Ochoa, Yosi Negrín and Ismael Santos. Together they have conceived a shared artistic project based on spontaneity and immediacy. Casa Antillón held its first exhibition in 2019: a performative experiment in a modest Madrid home. That same year, “SOLO SHOW” was created in collaboration with Casabanchel, bringing together 56 national and international artists in a domestic space during an ephemeral 24-hour experience.
In June 2020, the domestic broke out into the surrounding natural landscape during a one-day event at Casa de Campo in Madrid, where 20 local artists interacted with different spaces within the park.
