Peter Friedl
Rehousing

Published by Sternberg Press, Kunsthalle Wien, 2020

Contributions by Hanif Abdurraqib, Ibrahim al-Koni, Hala Alyan, Attila Bartis, Dionne Brand, Amina Cain, Ann Cotten, Achmat Dangor, Mark Z. Danielewski, Renee Gladman, Nalo Hopkinson, Annemarie Jacir, Davide Longo, Sabrina Orah Mark, Mohale Mashigo, Céline Minard, Karen Pinkus, Mark von Schlegell, Madeleine Thien, Mike Wilson

Rehousing is the title of a series of works by Peter Friedl which comprises a selection of individual, intricate, and true-to-scale models of houses. Collectively, these structures materialize as constructed environments that reflect the recent past, different biographies, and ideologies in diverse ways; they are “case studies for the mental geography of an alternative modernity.”

Rehousing is also the title of this publication, which revisits and reconceives the series through the juxtaposition of images of the individual models with a diverse collection of short stories and poems. Imagined as an anthology, as well as an artist book, it constitutes a reframing of the houses by the contributing authors who expand on the separate history of the buildings, draw on them to realize alternative fictions, or depart entirely from the origins of the related house altogether. Rehousing furthermore signals a change of location: a literal and metaphorical move to another type of accommodation, space, place, shelter, or home.