Performing the self: the construction of Casa Malaparte as living images

Abstract

The paper discusses architectural design as a transdisciplinary practice that interlinks architecture, performance, and the moving image through a building example: the Casa Malaparte, the house of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) built in Capri, Italy, between 1938 and 1942. Malaparte stated many times that he considered his house the best portrait of himself and he called the Casa Malaparte ‘A House Like Me’. Through theoretical, archival, and fieldwork research, the paper argues that the house performs Malaparte's autobiography. Unlike the conventional architectural design process, the Casa Malaparte was built by its owner Curzio Malaparte in collaboration with a master builder in an improvisational manner that incorporated methods of cinematic framing, material collage, and assemblage. The house is discussed as a self-portrait of its inhabitant questioning what could be architecture's role in mirroring the self and theorises Casa Malaparte's creation as a practice that works in between architecture, performance, and the visual arts. By drawing on Bertolt Brecht's ‘alienation effect’, Antonin Artaud's ‘theatre of cruelty’, and Denis Diderot discussion of the ‘tableau vivant’ which literally means ‘living pictures’, the paper provides theoretical frameworks that bring together spatial and performance theories. The Casa Malaparte as a tableau vivant is discussed as an alternative performative device that can potentially expand architectural design and render it as a living practice.