Mi Casa, Your Casa | Esrawe + Cadena

As part of a two-year initiative to activate the Sifly Piazza and engage the community in the vibrant campus of the Woodruff Arts Center designed by Renzo Piano, the High Museum of Art unveiled an ambitious interactive design installation entitled Mi Casa-Your Casa, conceptualized and created by contemporary Mexican designers-in-residence Héctor Esrawe and Ignacio Cadena. Mi Casa-Your Casa is a site-specific installation that will invite the community to actively participate in the life of the entire Woodruff Arts Center campus through recreation, social interaction, performances, and art-making activities.

Mi Casa-Your Casa is a welcoming space where visitors can play, create and relax. Hammocks, swings, easels, bins of chalk, and buckets of bubble water, among other elements, offer daytime “playtime” options. The Woodruff divisions (Alliance Theatre, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Arts for Learning) will utilize the installation for performances, youth education and more. The High is also collaborating with artists and performers from across the Atlanta arts spectrum to enliven the space. These highly unique and original collaborations will allow visitors to experience some of Atlanta’s most compelling artists in exciting new combinations as they explore new territory and branch out in fresh and unexpected directions to bring the Piazza to life with art.

The concept

The installation features 40 three-dimensional open frames in the shape of a house, The houses form a blank canvas for community engagement and activity in a basic- straight foreword- form recognizable and relatable to all ages and cultures: The home, a simple metaphor of - warmth & welcoming -. Mi Casa-Your Casa is inspired by the lively street markets -Mercados- of Latin America where human connections are made every day. The chromatic quality of the object responds to the red color painted steel structures that house each merchant and to design intention of creating high contrast against the white purity of Richard Mier´s and Renzo Piano´s Architecture.

The installation design objectives aspire to : Intrigue, invite, activate, build connections, blur boundaries, engage with the community, amaze, wonder, travel, mutate, bring joy, build identity and a sense of belonging.

Mi Casa-Your Casa more than an installation is a living object, a space... to be inhabited, a stage... to be observed, a workshop... to learn and a blank canvas... for open expression and interactivity, not one related to technology, but to human physical interaction.

High Museum of Art Atlanta, Woodruff Arts Center

July 18 - November 2, 2014