In the house, we are so alone that we are sometimes lost.
— Marguerite Duras, Écrire, 1993

If I were Esther Friedman, I might have something pithy to say about Berlin’s era of experimentation and alienation, its specific psyche and temporal states, rushes of systemic interconnectedness and isolation, glittery love affairs with rock stars, and its naivety, but I can stretch only as far as this: with the large apartments on Hauptstraße now divided into four smaller studios, there is always a problem of storage and one thin wall separates my bed from a stranger’s. It’s anything but well adjusted. To my advantage, though, this sort of ambiguous domesticity is not uninteresting. The parting wall has become enough of a thing to accuse an inflated haunted myth, and a halfway toward the desire to be ever amid melodrama. Without the bitterness of knowing, myths are a mournful daydream that might return to consume the sanest of notions.

For many days, I imagined a perfect heroine for this vague vertigo myth. She sits in her house, filled with barely desirable items for the modern home, where at all times she would feel a presence that is not frightening because of its alien nature, but because it was so familiar. She had found a way to not be at home in her home. The unhomely entered as she attempted to delineate the diffuse feeling of presence, acknowledged or not, it would spook when she manifested her double.

In the waking world, I can’t help but obsess over the superficial. And that devotion infiltrates this imagined heroine, like Izumi Suzuki’s thick plastic of the sadistic act of self-creation. Chantal Ackerman’s phrase, “elsewhere is always better,” reminds me that the new possibility for intimacy is what gives shape to our behaviours and relationships. But I tend not to overthink these things. I operate on mood alone.

Soggiorno means living room in Italian, and its verb soggiornare means “to stay.” Both involve a body and a house, at least for the most part, but they are separated by a gulf as wide as it is invisible. Only a hint at the enormous importance of rooms from Ackerman’s films affords the living room the subliminal choreography of the house. Perversely, hacking aspects of serialism and passivity of the interior to be filled with inescapable hunger and emotional exhaustion. But it’s the oscillations between sickness and health, home and invader, that draws me back to the image of my heroine.

The house is divided, already internally contradictory, like her it’s a jump cut between too far and far, it’s an anxiety-inducing cycle of anticipation and deferral. One word paronym echo later, a hotel, the most basic level of “stay,” is also a suspected double of the house. A hotel provides an established setting into which guests temporarily assimilate themselves, only to desert it with a little abrasion. It’s a facade of comfort which, to a hexed amateur, the prolonged vacancy could only mean more layers. Nothing is preserved, but permanence is artificial, and like the heroine it’s about accumulating the lack of coherence.

— Written by Minsuh Kang