Belleville, Paris
Group Exhibition
Cottagecore
SultanaJesse Darling Edie Fake Benoit Pieron Robin Plus Cottagecore explores the metaphors and relationships between the built environment and the built identity. The exhibition gathers works that materially and conceptually queer the architectural binaries of interior and exterior, center and margin, and their attending ableist, cishetero and chrononormative associations. The exhibition’s title refers to the eponymous online aesthetic and lifestyle trend that emerged on social media such as Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr where the term was coined in 2018. A contemporary iteration of 19th century Romanticism, with many similarities to the British Arts & Crafts Movement which developed in response to the deleterious effects of industrialization, Cottagecore promotes a pastoral domestic idyll of simple living in harmony with nature; characterized by baking, gardening, and crafts, as well as self-sufficiency and caretaking. The rise of cottagecore, which began in the mid-2010s amongst teens and young adults, notably within the LGBTQI+ online community, exploded in 2020 as the pandemic brought the world to a halt, confined most people to their homes, and triggered the mass realization that everything from where we live, to the ways we are forced to be productive and structure our time not only fails to serve most people, but are also not fixed and can be changed. Viewed progressively, cottagecore represents a rejection of the increasingly untenable demands of late-capitalism and oppressive normativity, and offers a space of radical potential in which kinship, labour, and time can be thought and enacted differently.