La Vie Mode de Desemploi

An aging body tends to become less individualized, as the need for other to care for it increases. The mostly individual spaces where care rituals are normally performed (mostly kitchen, bathroom) must therefore evolve to fit these evolving needs of dependant body care. As in the film «THE END», growing old in a domestic space, as a queer couple, simultanesouly involves an overlap of spatial function: different care rituals must take place in the same unfit, room and a fragmentation of time : so each ritual has to be performed in a linear temporality if the living room is used one at a time as a bathroom, a living room and bedroom and in the same manner, the kitchen is used as a bathroom and medical storage room, but no more as kitchen, there is no more time frame for it to perform its kitchen function. where does the kitchen go?

The functional fragmentation of individually performed spaces is in fact a reorganization of these spaces into one timeframe in which the multitude performs simultaneously. But you can’t see the whole if you don’t break the walls. This reframing must be as transversal cut through the blind walls of singular temporalities, where they can be seen coexisting and performing simultaneously, revealing the potential power of the whole. Their co-temporality, namely a co-existance of temporalities, allows being singular plural. The usually individualized care related spaces can be reframed to such transversally and collectively performing spaces for care rituals. Thus, it creates co-temporalities, for different generations, lifetimes and paths, as care work is common for all bodies at all time. The different types of care can be performed mutually and transversally in the aging process.

Body care spaces, namely former bathroom and kitchen, are reframed spatially, functionally and temporally to a transversal space, linking all units together. By removing walls usually splitting each apartment from one’s own kitchen and living room, walls are made optional and a space is created that connects all room’s of own’s one. By this principle, care in all form is being performed by multiple body abilities simultaneously, and allows the domestic space for aging queer couples or any other body willing to perform an everyday that is not exclusively individual.

The interdependant care space functions without destroying the feeling of home and intimacy, only while reconsidering what remains individual or collective. Doing so, it enables breaking up the linear temporality of heternormative narrative as well as the dichotomy between care giver and care receiver, and by enabling queer households to perform care in the present for the sake of a future. The collective care spaces created by the fragmentation of individual care spaces from the domestic space that thus do not fit the heteronormative family structure, can therefore be described as queer space as queerspace is the non nuclear, non linear, non fixed but performative, cotemporal, evolving.