Ophelie Prevesianos is a French MA architecture student. Before pursuing her MA at the Royal College of Art, she studied an Architecture BA at Central Saint Martins. She worked in interior design and architectural practices in Paris and London.
Her research interests are exploring how non-traditional architectural representations such as film, painting and performance, allow new forms of architectures and spatial experiences based on real life and emotions.
A House by Four Women
Staging the female gaze on the domestic through dialogues and film making.
This project looks to explore notions of domesticity and domestic space through the gaze of four young Parisian women: Lou, Charlotte, Ariane and myself, Ophelie. The project aims to unpack the female gaze on the domestic, by staging our group of four Parisian friends, imagining through Zoom conversations at home, the house in which we would like to live together.
This collective house is conceptualised through filmed domestic scenes and dialogues. The film elaborates a methodology infiltrating the personal lives of the group of friends, through a series of filmed activities such as cooking and eating, and dialogues about love and beauty. Spontaneous conversations on zoom between friends allow to reveal personal details and emotions that usually do not end up in a traditional architectural project. Our habits, memories, fears, irritations, and desires collected throughout the film, shape this imaginary collective house.
The project reflects on the traditional position of architecture as a rational and vertical practice and proposes one that is much closer to personal emotions. The process of positioning the architect on the exact same level to the future users by imagining this future house together, brings a richness to the design that would have not occur by looking at the project from a rational and distanced vertical point of view. This horizontal design practice based on emotions and real life enrich the design and humanise the relationship between architects and non-professional architects.
The film is constructed through filmed daily activities in which we drink, we cook, we eat, we work, we dress up, we make the bed, we make up, we transit, we work while we talk about subjects such fashion, beauty, love, house labour, aging, sexuality, work, and our future house. Also, the multitude of camera angles creates a mosaic of interiors as if the viewer was looking through the façade of a Parisian building.
Artist collaborators:
Lou Duckett
Ariane Guyon
Charlotte Rault
Ophelie Prevesianos
From conversations our group of friends created a fantastic house, in which each room was a parody reflecting on the issues, desires, irritations, habits, we experience in the domestic. To design our house, I selected ten dialogues from the film and translated them into spatial concepts for our future house.
