M10, 2004
MDF, wallpaper, carpet, pendant lights 250 x 519 x 490 cm
Photo: Marcos Morilla
At first, M10 evokes a maze, while its look and feel resembles the make-up of low-income housing during socialist Poland, where Monika Sosnowska grew up. Exploring that past, she focuses on the way the modernist architectural utopia has been perverted by the Polish administration of that time. Taking her cue from the system set forth to assign housing in a context of chronic shortage, she has imagined the consequences of a system pushed ad absurdum. Indeed, as living space grew scarce in the 1960s, the authorities repartitioned existing apartments to accommodate more inhabitants. A classification system based on the number of rooms rather than on size meant that an M2 (two rooms) could easily become an M4. M10 is a ten-room unit fitting the size of a typical M1. Rather than employing the approach of an anthropologist or historian, Sosnowska works on the borderline between the physical and the mental, between memory and presence.
