Lived scenographies
Home, here or there, a practice of recomposition.

This essay draws on research I developed as part of my Specialised Master's thesis in Architecture and Scenography at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville, 2026.

I have been thinking about home.

About the homes of the past, scattered throughout memories.
About new homes composed of present, past, and future lives.

I am not referring to the built space, but to the way we inhabit it.

The routines, the objects, the movements, the displacements, the shifts in arrangement in relation to a sequence of spaces. A small entrance that opens into a living room, a narrow hallway that leads to a bedroom with a window facing the main street, where you can hear the cars go by.

I am interested in particular in the home that was left behind, perhaps temporarily, but that is no longer part of a constant present, beyond memories. Perhaps a home that no longer exists because we no longer inhabit it, but that the body still remembers and that seeks, somehow, to recompose.

The precise gesture the hand learns how to turn and open a stubborn doorknob, the place where the keys are deposited almost without thinking upon entering, that painting we see hanging on the wall, possibly done by a relative who over the years decided to dedicate themselves to painting, a selection of framed photographs arranged on the sideboard, the distance between the chair and the window where in the afternoon one drinks coffee, the piece of furniture whose only function is to display a collection of objects, meticulously selected, that in one way or another represent us, we make them ours, we welcome them in. The body and its surroundings develop an intimate relationship that, with time, becomes instinct. The environment takes shape over time, structured by habit…and so do we.

But inhabiting is not only a bodily act. Home exists, first and foremost, in the imaginary of each person. It is not only a physical structure but an internal construction shaped by personal history, culture, memory; by the social and the economic. The inhabited space, with its routines, its objects, its arrangements, is the externalization of that dialogue, often silent, between what we are and what we would like to be. Home is, in this sense, an extension of the self: provisional, in continuous negotiation, always in the process of transforming.

Clare Cooper Marcus, in her book House as a Mirror of Self, argues that home is rarely the result of a conscious and deliberate decision. Its spatial qualities are deposited little by little, through repeated habits and almost imperceptible adjustments that, precisely because of their everyday nature, escape reflection. Yet that apparent neutrality is deceptive: the order or disorder of a room, the openness of a space or its sense of enclosure, reveal aspects of the interior life that could hardly be expressed in any other way. The domestic space becomes, according to the author, a kind of involuntary self-portrait.

In this sense, the objects we inhabit, and that inhabit us, are not merely decorative or functional elements. They actively participate in the construction of the self. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this with precision when he speaks of an ecology of signs, a web of things and arrangements through which identity takes shape, sustains itself, and communicates itself, both outward and inward.

This relationship, however, is not stable. Building a home is a provisional and reversible act: we sort, discard, and install objects that adjust to our reality of the moment. As Georges Perec notes in Espèces d'espaces, space is never definitively possessed, but continuously remarked and renegotiated.

This condition becomes especially acute when one inhabits a new space, where the body arrives carrying all previous spaces. Gaston Bachelard argues that the places inhabited in the past do not disappear: they persist in the body as a dimensional memory, made of thresholds, proportions, angles of light. Inhabiting is always a superimposition. Inhabiting a new home intensifies that condition until it becomes perceptible: the new space must be negotiated against layers of spatial memory that do not belong to it. And it is in this displacement that something different begins: a selection, a decision-making process. Which objects have a place, how they are arranged, what remains visible and what is put away.

A process of installation that is, inevitably, a process of narration. We choose, even when we may not know it, how we want to be read, how we want to be seen.

And it is precisely from this perspective that the composition —and recomposition— of home reveals itself as a scenographic practice. The interior life takes visible, spatial form: the objects and their arrangement tell a story that language does not always manage to say.

And in that process of displacement, of making home out of an unfamiliar space, we reconstruct ourselves.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l'espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.

Cooper Marcus, Clare. House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Berkeley: Conari Press, 1995.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.

Perec, Georges. Espèces d'espaces. Paris: Galilée, 1974.