Wrangled by ideology, a putative convivial long table in a round house becomes a benighted round table for a longhouse. Here, a gloomthy lurker, your devouring mother will feed you now. Sitting at the centre of her knotty glulam web, Ghotmeh presides over a fully operational battle follie ~ weaponised soft play for infantile adults - scattered seating for a shadowy and introspective committee mulling the imposition of care. Inside, her crinkle cut brolly bundt cake bears claustrophobically low, bellying its spaceship hull with an abductive light beam from its oracular orifice. Thusly is vulvacore a womby antidote to phallic architectural hegemony.
The Serpentine’s blurb calls this “Archaeology of the Future” ~ a neat God-complex writing of our history laundering colonial nostalgia in subtractive architectonics of excavated skeletal forms. The nonagonic plan is formed in the negative space left as convex curves are cast between nine defensive spikes as the air is sucked out of the void between them. The enclosure is veiled in CNC lifestyle fretwork, a house of card ply doilies in cutesy Afrofuturism appropriated scandi with aboriginal flourishes ~ trypophobic colander-core: Etsy ethnic candle holder by night, and by day, a backdrop for Insta’s boho yolo fomos and their monstera deliciosas.
