House Taken is an itinerant project of urban intervention, where more than 3000 ant sculptures  are  deployed  in  facades  and  architectural  structures  to  speak  of  diaspora, forced displacement and uprooting, in the context of globalization. The intervention aims to create significant images in the spectator, as well as to open a debate regarding this contemporary issue, though an international route that passes through historical points of departure and arrival of innumerable travelers and immigrants in many cities of the world, performing  temporary  transformations  in  the  dynamics  and  significance  of  the  public space.  

 

This initiative aims to open a debate over the different human dramas that emerge from the intersections of body, territory and identity, through the confrontation of social imaginaries of different communities and social systems, and whose stage is the city, where the game of the multicultural tests the values and identities of the different subjects in dialogue. What’s the condition of the (social, urban) spaces transformed by diaspora? Is it about a process of destruction or abandonment, or perhaps an inevitable cultural change that gives way to the new, to the hybrid, as an inherent condition of the historical processes? Each of the ants is structured  from the mold of two human skulls, thus clearly encouraging the rhetoric game and also adding new dimensions of significance to the sculptural object, that juxtapose to those signs emerged from the first contact with the intervention.

 

The ritual forms of the construction of the social, habitat and identity are confronted through the changes stimulated by human displacements, thus generating an inevitable questioning  for  the  significance  and  stability  of  the  very  existence.  Moreover,  in  the context of globalization, where not only transportation and communication dynamics are boosted, but also where a normalization of cultural contents takes place as a result of this compulsive movement of people, capitals and information.

 

House Taken over stimulates the awareness of the impact of these dynamics over human life, this overwhelming occupation of a building by the ants is no more than a reflex from the violent consequences, both physic and symbolic, of globalization. It also acknowledges that these transformations threaten the stability of social systems and generate process of retreat of the communities over themselves, this is, that in the world of the transcultural and international citizenships, the process of resistance are generated inside local and regional cultures, against the threat of their disappearance. The massive presence of ants is an excuse for engaging in dialogue and meditation over the way these processes take place.

 

David Ayala Alfonso