Red house storyThe stories about the red houses in the red house. Individual representations inThe big red house that is the diffuse the flexible memoryThe general is to connect, to a certain extent, to the big red house. They feel a part of.

house without an exitit is just imagined Imagination doesn’t quit your inner space

Is it where “Tida har ikkje stoppa, men det er ingen klokker som tikkar” (informant)?In Martin Heidegger´s words, we are thrown into the world. Through our physical and mental constructions we transform our experiences of outsideness and estrangement into the positive feelings of insideness and domicile.’ Home is, thus, where we tend to return.

Our predecessors and the old submitted houses have shown us a way of acting in space. Where to bend down not to crack the front head in the low openings between the rooms, how to ‘work with’ the house to keep it in a comfortable temperature, where not to step, how sounds are perforated through walls, in which order to act, preferable gestures using interior elements... The ways of using the rooms are in some manner inherited subconciously, as the lived space becomes a part of habitus. Repeating movement, how your parents or grand parents used to live in space and how the space itself invite to a certain way of acting. Sounds, movements, memories, in this regard, inhabit spaces, program the rooms and make the space familiar and concievable to us. There is no written manual of how to use the space- the manual is the people and the bodily stories within the space.

Å bu er vidare i slekt med å vera. På norsk kjenner me til dømes utsegnet “Det bur ikkje noko godt i han”, som uttrykkjer ta han ikkje er god. På samisk blir verbet orrut, å bu, brukt tilsvarande. Å bu er såleis knytt til det grunleggjande, å vera til stades eller, sagt meir poetisk: å vera i livet, open for alle ting” (Det samiske slektstu-net, Skålnes, Sunniva).

Storytelling keeps ‘the told’ alive and in dynamic evolvement. The reciever construct a subjective reinterpreta-tion of what the teller conveys. We share the same story (the big red house), although we construct our very own inner images (each small red), which the teller is unable to control, just influence. What I see, what we see. The sense of the the story remains equal, but it changes a little, through how it is remembered and the seletion of words, pauses, dialect etc. used in the re - telling. Storytelling is adaptable, flexible and changable. Oral tradition could be described as episodic, non - linear, dynamic, concrete, social and narrative (http://infodesign.no/artikler/muntlig_140302.htm). “Muntlige tekster kan [...] forandres under selve formidlingen, noe som gjør det mulig å skreddersy budskapet underveis” (McKnight 1991:20). The exitement of how stories alter, trigger me.

I try to evoke the collective memory of ‘home’, arranged as a bank or encyclopedia of ‘home’. Although not as freezed, “museal”. The memory and the lived space is in use. It is the foundation of how future acts are con-ceived, like a habitus incorporated, spatial education. It is about how to structure collections of ‘home’. “Mens modellbyggeren ser tilbake, ser samleren fremover. (...) Mens ting faller fra hverandre hos modellbyggeren, gjør samleren et mer vellykket forsøk på å skape et system, en orden” (About Leonard Rickhard’s work, Røed, Kjetil, Aftenposten kultur, 01/2011). Pallasmaa says: “A great building makes us experience gravity, time and

the stories about the red houses in the red house.........space in space in space.......

“i samfunn der skrift ikke finnes eller har liten betydning, vil erindringen være desto viktigere: både historien og kunsten byg-ger på det som menneskene selv husker og kan føre videre fra generasjon til generasjon.” Anne Eriksen (s.7, 1999)

- ultimately - ourselves, in a strengthened and meaningful way. A positive architectural experience is basi-cally a strengthened experience of Self which places one convincingly and comfortingly in the continuum of culture, and enables one to understand the past and believe in the future.” He lets Rickhard’s model maker and collector meet.

Fjord Jensen categoried narratives:• the individual • the family • the national • the global/the God • story

A story can tell something about several dimensions. A multitude of stories that we can attach to, contribute in positioning us and constructing our identity. I think the story(-ies) of the red house, the ‘home’, addresses stories of the individual, the family and the Norwegian culture. • story in story in story •

The ancient Norwegians were suspicious of books and feared that the written word would impair the memo-ry and what one used to remember. An old, illiterate pesant from Telemark, looked upon himself as a strong word - holder, and felt offended by the need of present written documentation (http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntlig_litteratur).But gradually, the storyteller is being replaced by the author. Paradoxically, some holders of traditions write their history down, in fear of loosing it. Faith in the ability to remember seems to be weakened. The thoughts should have a viability, as the written.

In this context, Asbjørnsen who stressed a ‘oral - written’ storytelling style, is worth mentioning. He gained popularity in his authentic way of collecting the oral tales, which seems to differ from the general attitude of his time; in the moment tales were written down, folk tales were selected, purified, expounded and altered due to the national, romantic European age of the 17th century (http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntlig_lit-teratur).

A contemporary juxtaposition to Asbjørnsen, where the concluding written and the ephemeral oral operate in a mixed arena, is perhaps the electronic, social networks: “The electronic transformation of verbal expression has both deepened the commitment of the word to space inhabited by writing, /../ and has brought conciousness to a new age of secondary orality” (Ong 1982:136).

Sami oralityInger Marie Nilut joiked to us in Kautokeino. She introduced us to joik, as a ‘moment - transmission’. It de-mands presence and listening. Joik is orally concieved and not documentable. The spatial experiences I want to grasp should possess similar attributes. How joik can be provoked by a place is in this means interesting. Nilut told me how she joiks a place, and how a joik get to you at a certain place or setting. The connetability to the spatial and mental environment is thus apparent.

The joik is just one example of a Sami way of bringing forward cultural capital to the next generation, orally. It is a subjective oriented learning strategy, a learning through action within the family. It is a vulnerable method, but to me, a credible one. Likewise, we hear of fishermen and old pesants that regard themselves as ‘the last tail’ in a chain of agricul-tural activities and a close connection to their immidiate environment. How space is performed is indeed incorporated in space itself and the people who attach to the space. How should their stories then be com-municated, when members of the new generation are about to leave ‘home’ (might be physically and/or as it used to be thought of)?

“It has been asserted that perfumes produce a placebo effect... During the bombing of London in the Second World War, the British sprayed lavender in their bomb shelters, not just to cover up unplesant odors, but perhaps more so to calm their fears. The scent of lavender evoked for them a clean and reassuring home-like setting. [...]” (Invisible architecture, Barbara, Anna and Perliss, Anthony, 2006). It is thus evident that ‘home’ is likely to be associated, with memory, mental and sensory instruments; ‘home’ could appear anywere, any time.

“(Leonard) Rickhards rammebruk har en arkitektonisk tyngde, soliditet og tekstur som henvises til huset som stabiliserende oppholdssted og betryggende ramme [...]. Hjemmets natur er begrensende i forhold til utsyn og innsyn” (Røed, Kjetil, Aftenposten kultur, 01/2011). ‘Home’ is framed within our visual perception of home, but is still a space that we think of outside the home. My intention is to expand the ‘home’, re - consti-tute ‘home’, in a more elusive way, as our mind.

The ‘home’ is deliberately ‘re - presented’ without geopgraphy, which is partly influenced of Juhani Pallas-maa’s concern of ‘lived space’. “We remember the world as lived spaces and situations, not as mere pictures. (...) They are mental and embodied images, lived metaphors....” Noël Arnaud claims “The space is in you and potentially always present. Man and space are one. I am the space where I am”.On my behalf I want to explore the spaces in our mind projected in a physical experience. The thought and the visually percieved bind up variables as social relations, sensory perception, memory and identity. I think ‘home’ as I explore it has sort of a geographical position in the sense of geographial references, but the geog-raphy is primarily thought or remembered.

Tarkovsky describes “the loss of home also on a more general level; modern man has abandoned his spiritual and mental home and is forever on a journey towards an unattainable utopia. Our homelessness has a meta-physical dimension; a godless man is fundamentally a traveller without a destination, without an ultimate spiritual home. Buildings are monuments and road signs on this journey of distancing, alienation and out-sideness.” I therefore thought of a counterweight to the homelessness of the age, provide a possibility to ‘go home’, in an athmosphere with a closeness that ‘home’ provides. Perhaps we have physically left home, but we could still facilitate it in our mind. I think how we contemporarily create the settings of ‘home’ should not be history - denying, as a tabula rasa, but more like a palimpsest; new layers on imperfect erasures, as Massey calls it.

Pallasmaa described ‘windows and doors as framing devices’. In the execise where I introduced this task I was ‘collecting’ door and window elements from photos applied to the internet. I notied a notable distance between the photographed object and the photographer, and thus the difficulty in surpassing there framings and having glimpses inside ‘the home’. If not having an obvious connection to a certain home it is hard to enter ‘the home’, and perhaps memories of a spatiality that you carry within your family or within youself. In an assembly of homes, I hope to catch ‘home’ space with elements of the spatial projection, where anyone, if desired, can visit home and associate themselves with parts of it. For achieving this, I want to establish an encyclopedia - instrument of different ‘home’ trackings; sound, smell, photos etc.. that people themselves record where they consider ‘home’. Then to send the recordings to the pipe system of a ‘home’ I create, where they are to be projected.

A home that need people and memories to be.

“[...] What the artist began, the audience completes. It is the visitors that make The Weather Project unforget-table. From any distance at all, people in the Turbine Hall are seen as tiny black silhouettes against a field of orange light. Minuscule in scale and robbed by the orange glow of their individuality, they are diminished by the spectacle they have come to the Tate to see. Paradoxically, the less we look like individuals, the more

aware we become that we share a common humanity [..] What this great artist has done, literally, is to hold up a mirror and shown us who we are” (Dorment, Richard, The Telegraph, 12 Nov 2003). By subtracting the individuality Eliasson obtains a collective understanding/behavior in space that interests me. Two people are objects to act more similar in a space that provides a certain way of being, rather than what one individual is due to be recognized in two completely different settings (missing reference).