Surrealist Curation: Urban Domesticity Through the Surrealist Poetics of Analogy

Abstract

The tactic of surrealist poetic analogy forms the surrealist curation that functions as an agent that occupies, engages, and ultimately transforms the city and its built environment that surrounds us. In the case of Le Corbusier’s roof terrace of the Beistegui apartment in Paris, Le Corbusier uses intentional movements and visual analogical compositions to dictate a curated urban experience in a domestic space. The surrealist curation unfolds the tenacious relationship between house and city through an analogical narrative, in which the house extends its boundaries to the public realm and brings domesticity into the city. In the case of Alÿs’ Modern Procession in New York City, the carried art objects, the music performed during the procession, and the movements of the participants domesticate urban streets by relocating art objects from the interior of a private museum institution to the public urban space. The juxtaposed urban elements enact a poetic transformation that facilitates the surrealist curation to assemble an “oneiric house” filled with fantasy. The paper argues that the surrealist curation evokes “dream images” in the city that transcends the tangible material city into a dream entity and looks beyond the built environment to understand the city. By implementing the surrealist curation one can further challenge the perceptions of urban spatial boundaries and investigate the theoretical and historical overlaps between urban domesticity and surrealist imagination. Surrealist curation criticizes the homogenous quantitative treatments of urbanism and their analytical data-driven approaches to urban transformation, calls for the examination of poetic relationships in our cities through visual fantasies, corporeal kinesthesia, and alternative narratives of reveries.