Loft is displayed in the form of twelve walls lined with ten different coverings – marble, tiles (two different patterns), wall paper (two different patterns), stainless steel, wood, stucco, mirror, mosaic tiles, carpet and lacquered paint – each wall linked to a specific area of the house. The arrangement of the walls within the space creates a new spacial organisation, simulating the different rooms of the house: the kitchen, the living room, the couple’s bedroom, the children’s bedroom, the bathroom. 

From within the walls, erupt textile tentacular shapes, rich in textures and colour – they combine industrial fabrics, hand-made techniques and a rich decoration –, extended over the space of the gallery, connecting the different walls, creating thus a bizarre ambiance which is, at the same time, close to everyday reality – not only the wall surfaces but also the fabrics and the decorations are easily recognisable. 

There is an expression in Portuguese which would take on a deeply ironical sense when confronted with Joana Vasconcelos' installation: “Nem às paredes confesso” (Not even to the walls do I dare confess) relates to the most intimate of secrets, the intimacy of intimacy, non-susceptible to confession or sharing. “Loft” seems to metaphorically confront this reality from fragments of architectonic structures which have been wrecked and pierced through by strange and colourful textile shapes. These are perhaps the entrails of architecture – plumbing, air ducts, electrical wiring, etc – or the viscera of our intimacy, metamorphosed into textile shapes that challenge the rational order of architectural space. Fed up with being confined, they rebel, transform and make themselves known; colourful, strange yet familiar, breaking through the different surfaces of the cocoons that accommodated them.

“Loft” challenges the lifeless structures of the intimacy of home. These “walls” do not dissimulate, do not conceal or hide ears, as an old Persian proverb alerted to; rather, they reveal a deep hedonist desire of expressing life through the richness of the absurd and the surreal.