House Mon-/ Mel-/Mer-/ Daedal is a site-specific installation of ephemeral structures created by the artist Emanuela Marcu in a rented council apartment. These ‘lived-in’ structures, re-created in the public/gallery space, maintain an ambiguous state, in between the notions of artistic, intimate, public spaces. The technique used is collage, a Deluzian flow of curviliniar, folding/-unfolding matter. It is an (appropriated/reflected)’Merzian’ collage of the inhabited space. Materials are mainly charcoal and tape (alluding to/echoing Mondrian’s paintings and constructed studio). The central theme is that of constrictive collective housing. It is a poetic structure of elytra-like ephemera, inspired by Konstantin Melnikov’s Daedalian house, built during the USSR communal housing period.
The piece included two stages – one, represented by the installation in the rented flat and the second by the one (re)-created in the building of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. It shall contain future re-folding stages, its current stated being essentially unfinished, undetermined, in flux.