March 19 — August 14, 2017
BoCA - Biennial of Contemporary Arts
Complexo dos Coruchéus, Lisbon, Portugal

Installation, open call
Curated by John Romão

Casa-Animal is a temporary monument, stage and architectural device conceived as an open structure for exhibition, performance and collective activation. Developed in collaboration with architect Miguel Roxo and engineer Vasco de Barros, the project takes the form of a dismantlable, transportable metal structure designed for public space intervention.

The work proposes a hybrid condition between architecture and animality, positioning itself between shelter, chapel and stable. Rather than functioning as a fixed building, Casa-Animal operates as a mutable framework in which uses, behaviours and narratives are continuously reconfigured by those who enter it.

Installed within the context of the BoCA - Contemporary Art Biennale, the structure hosted a programme of projections, installations, conversations and performative actions, including the premiere of a new film by Musa paradisiaca and other events developed through an open call.

The architecture is conceived as both object and platform: a scaled environment that oscillates between monumentality and improvisation. Its formal language suggests a reduced but charged spatial system, where boundaries between exhibition space, stage and inhabited structure are deliberately blurred.

By introducing a “house-animal” logic, the project destabilises conventional distinctions between domestic space and public infrastructure, proposing instead a porous environment in which human and non-human relations, fiction and use, coexist without hierarchy.

Rather than presenting a completed architectural object, Casa-Animal functions as an activated framework — a place defined less by its form than by the temporary constellations of actions it enables.