AN ANTI-HOUSE FOR MRS. ROWLING

The Harry Potter brand has been estimated to be worth as much as $15 billion.

What is a “house”…?

And what is an “anti-house”…?

We believe that to know what a true “house” is coincides, almost, to knowing what Life itself is!

It is the ultimate knowledge.

But easy answers make our time in particular so very self-confident that it is quite hard to express any doubts, or a sincere un-knowing.

The “phenomenon” Rowling is typical for our time, obsessed as it is with entertainment and the escapisms it entails.

Through Harry Potter we mimic dreaming, inasmuch as through our “lives,” often, we mimic living.

It is possible that at a time like ours Dostoevsky could not have lived, or if he did, he would have been silenced by the immense noise generated by myriad of voracious writers - entrepeneurs, whose "success" is often nothing else but a vulgar and sad "big business."

It came as no surprise to learn about the new plans Mrs. Rowling has to build for her two youngest children giant "tree houses," on her estate in Edinburgh.

These "tree houses" are other invitations to the superficial dreaming her novels are so very famous for.

Shallow "dreams"… and the infantilization of culture our time so blatantly indulges in finds here, as elsewhere, a very adequate and well-deserved expression.

If we cannot build for Dostoevsky, let’s build for Mrs. Rowling!

Or let’s imagine an anti-house for her, to wake her up!

And to wake ourselves up, in case we are “dreaming” in the same key...!

« El sueño de la razon produce monstruos » is the title of a famous work by Goya. Paraphrasing him we could say that El sueño de la non-razon produce monstrous. 

Not only the sleep / dream of reason produces monsters, but equally so the sleep / dream of “un-reason.”

It is the “Gothic” “un-reason” that animates Mrs. Rowling and our longings, when visiting her “visions.”

But this “un-reason,” or the “un-conscious,” or… can be healthy, or not.

We believe that the mental universe of these “highly successful” stories that Mrs. Rowling made up is actually as dangerous to our wellbeing as what they try to oppose: our harsh, raw “reality.”

So an Anti-House for her would be something that would try to approximate the very opposite of what her escapisms do, be they literary or architectonic.

We invite you to imagine something that opposes the very dangerous infantilization of culture that these falsely innocent “enterprises” promote.

Can we do it…?

Please send us ANY work, ANY size and ANY format.

Thank you.

ICARCH Gallery.