Broadcast to a live audience in Madrid from IKEA Kungens Kurva in Stockholm, this performative lecture approached the figure of the domestic-interior-as-stage as a Foucauldian apparatus within the historical framework of the construction of the contemporary Swedish nation in the Folkhemmet years, and its ‘Disneylandlike’, global evolution into the IKEAN discursive apparatus.
What happens inside IKEA Kungens Kurva in the south of Stockholm, modelled after the Guggenheim in NYC? What lessons did IKEAN museography take from the world’s first neoliberal museum of Western modernity?
Through the IKEAN staged interior, architecture becomes an image, and its representative power – the power to modify space through the repetition and variation of a specific architectural ‘type’- becomes its major strength, thus becoming a ‘spatial product’. The tension which occurs in staged domesticity generates a productive dichotomy: networked domesticities simultaneously become a system, a sort of ‘interior urbanism’, and an architectural apparatus which operates through an idea of privacy, individuality, and customization.
