Lovaratory
Lovaratory is a spatial exploration platform based on research of multi-human love relationships in the post-romantic age of rapid technological acceleration and global digitalization.
Lovaratory investigates alternative relationships and family structures, exploring alternative types of love through the prism of emerging spatial components. It looks on various types of love-based households as a kick-off for creating domestic spaces and new dwelling typologies as well as speculating on human habitats of the future.
With the support of Housing the Human, Lovaratory aims to vastly expand its ongoing research with a hands-on, practical study, exploring the spatial components of diverse types of polyamorous households (polygyny, polyandry, “V” and “M” relationships, triads, quads, polyfidelity, solo-poly, relationship anarchies, etc.) in order to figure out new or potential domestic vocabularies.
Dasha Tsapenko (UA, NL) is a Ukrainian-born architect and social designer based in the Netherlands. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in Architecture from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Ukraine, as well as M.A. in Social Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
Currently a designer in residence at the Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Tsapenko explores the role of private domesticities in terms of spatial restraints and segregation. She focuses her design research precisely on domestic spaces on a downgraded scale, dismantling the components of a house to the state of a single spatial act. Through a variety of artistic and design mediums, Tsapenko imposes restraints and obstructions that in her eyes are underestimated in the contemporary world of extreme freedoms, possibilities, and indulgence as a way of reflecting on a dream of personal will through extensive bodily experience.
How has the prototype evolved over the last months?
The presentation at CAFx will give insights into the processWhat is the mutually defined relationship between the domestic landscape and romance, and how can a specific romantic connection create/change /influence /destroy this landscape? Does the notion of romantic love and its mediated image determine how we furnish interiors and organize our domestic experiences?
As part of its ongoing research, LOVARATORY invites the guests of the Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) to investigate what the domestic outcomes of various love relationships might look like. In a series of performances with these guests, new models and scenarios can be tested in a life-size space, using interchangeable and interconnected props for single, double, and group use that accommodate our bodies in unusual ways.
This project phase intends to reveal the construct of unspoken physical language within everyday domestic relational power structures.
The Finished Prototype
At the Housing the Human Festival, a domestic environment accommodates alternative romantic relationships
Lovaratory is a spatial exploration platform based on the research of human-nonhuman amorous relationships in a projected post-romantic age of rapid technological acceleration and digitalization. The framework of an urban dwelling is used to explore everyday routines, rituals, and commodities, as well as the physical and emotional parameters of human-nonhuman romantic co-existence. What would domestic artifacts look like when they are formed by relationships between a queer female human and a male pug, a 5-year-old Carnegiea Giganteia Cactus and a homosexual male, or maybe a heterosexual female and her AI boyfriend?
At radialsystem, Lovaratory will take the shape of an inhabited domestic environment that serves as a home for three relationship structures, showcasing the everyday domestic context of each particular inhabitant, private spaces, and overlaps in the ecosystem generated by the co-existence of different bodies and maters.
Lovaratory was developed in partnership with Future Architecture Platform.
