Valérie Morisson: When I visited Marjan Teeuwen's installation, Destroyed House, in Arles last summer, which was set on the site of a former garage, I was impressed by the fact that although the work was designated as a house it was both a sculpture and a piece of architecture. Should the term "house" be understood as metaphorical in Marjan Teeuwen's installations? E. V. A.: Although today more and more people live in tents or other temporary constructions, and a house can also consist of a boat, as in a houseboat, we first of all think of an architectural construction, a building, in which people live and which they have made their home. But the word "house" signifies more than just the building that offers a home; it also stands for family. When we talk about the House of Orange we do not refer to one of their royal palaces. The term covers the complete lineage and ancestry of the family, not only the family members that are still alive. In other words, the word "house" also refers to a family and its roots, to genealogical memory. In languages such as English, French and Dutch the use of the word house is metaphorical. Only in special contexts and cases does it have this meaning of /family/ as intertwined with the architectural meaning. The best-known example is Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher". The House of Usher is not diagnosed by its destruction but by its downfall, which indicates that it concerns primarily a family and not a building, although the collapse of the building materializes the downfall, indeed the extinction of the family. In Arab and Hebrew, however, they have one term that has these two different meanings systematically. The Arab word "bait" and the Hebrew word "bet" are homonyms. They each concern a concept -or, if you wish, two words that are both spelled and pronounced identically, but have different meanings. In those languages the destruction of a house is completely ambiguous: it refers to the destruction of a building that serves as a home to people and to the destruction of the genealogical memory of a family; and the one through the other, because the physical construction is the equivalent of the roots of a family it harbours.
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