Begun in 2008, the work was born in reference to the book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008) by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. In his book, the author encourages us to resist any form of engagement with the world and to withdraw ourselves in order to establish some distance for criticism. Aristide Antonas considers this form of "withdrawal" as the foundation of our current relationship to the daily and the real rather than a heroic posture of resistance. Composed of a multitude of sub-projects, The House for Doing Nothing defines the protagonist’s—a hero or a common man—living environment in a fiction form of tale. In the era of hyperconnectivity, the domestic condition is experiencing a sort of paradox: "being at home" is also being connected to the world. The individual is no longer isolated from the public sphere. On the opposite, it is this withdrawal that now structures the social sphere. The home has become an interface combining the private and public spheres, revealing a deep crisis in the traditional notions of "self," "community" and "society." It is this new nature of home—and therefore of man—that Aristide Antonas looks to challenge in The House for Doing Nothing, by questioning the role, or even the political responsibility of the domestic condition.
The narrative of the flying floor is an installation composed of two 1:2 scale models made in 2017 for the first Architecture Biennial of Orléans. It extends the architect’s research on the bed as fundamental element of the house. According to Antonas, the domestic home was the scene of a latent conflict during the modern formation of cities, opposing two essential pieces of furniture : the bed and the table, the latter which came out losing. The bed has assumed the role of a minimal “urban cell”, and deployed a plurality of extensions to form a system. Aristide Antonas therefore sees the city of today as a “village-infrastructure” in which the different levels of domestic life would be summarized in different variations of the bed.
The cycle described by The House for Doing Nothing sometimes seems to be built on a desert island. The video Confinement in Landscape shows, through a slow silent travelling short, a representation of this desert. The film was shot on a part of the island of Hydra, and thus reveals a strong contrast with the image that we have of the island’s tourist areas. Far from being an invitation to the real of exoticism, Confinement in Landscape embodies, on the contrary, the affirmation of the exotic condition’s banality : this exotic journey that constitutes the “withdrawal” is, in an hyper-connected society, an almost banal habit of our cities.
