The video, Proposition d'habitation, offers a demonstration of the use of a series of cells forming living spaces, which the artist designed for his own use. It consists of 6 models at scale 1, reduced dimensions, custom-built for the artist's size and build. These are simple geometric shapes, covered in white plaster or paint, which make no claim to any particular function. These white houses, immaculate and asexual, invite their unique protagonist, Absalon, to isolation and introspection.

Varying in dimension from 4 to 9 m², each "cell" (prototype living space) is different in appearance but contains the same basic elements, the vital minimum requirements for a single person – a kitchenette, a work area with a table and chair for reading, writing and eating, a cupboard-wardrobe, which is also the bed, a shelf, a shower and a toilet.

The interiors of these cells are identical to their exteriors: integrated elements that are uniformly white. Based on combinations of cubes and cylinders, the square and the circle, these objects look like furniture but are deliberately non-functional.

Proposition d'habitation experiments with their use. The video shows us a man, dressed from head to toe in a white nightshirt, moving around in a universe that is ordered, rigid and silent. The protagonist of the video uses his body, folding and unfolding it to experience these furnishings-objects. First, we see him lying in a half cylinder that is used as a bed. He then enters a square that puts one in mind of a lavatory, puts his head in a cylinder that looks like a well and then finishes by sitting in a half-cylinder 'armchair'. The architecture provides resistance to his body. It obliges him to adopt certain postures; it imposes routes and restricts him by its rigidity. Here, the body is put to the test: it has to modulate and adapt to the restrictions imposed by these volumes.

Normal, everyday actions are slightly perturbed by this, being turned into something unexpected and illogical. Spectators are confronted with behaviour that swings from the ordinary (the familiar) to the extraordinary (the unrecognisable). Both subject and object, protagonist and material, active and passive, the body becomes an abstract entity – anonymous and infinitely flexible, a simple subject given over to an objective demonstration.

Before his death (in 1993), Absalon planned to install his six Prototypes d'habitation in six different cities around the world. He wanted to put one in each major city that represented a centre of artistic interest – particularly Paris, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt and Zurich. More akin to the tent or caravan than the conventional house, these cells would have enabled him to move from one place to another without really changing his space. The domesticity that is represented here isn't sedentary; it's alternative and mobile – a constant and pertinent questioning about habitat and its limits.

Cristina Ricupero