Modern Plumbing

Résumé En

The two visuals chosen for communication relating to the symposium that brought us together, Intimacy Exposed. Toilet Bathroom, Restroom, raised questions. The call for projects was launched with a photograph showing two series of urinals placed on either side of a room with yellow walls and a black and white checkered floor. Rather than signifying the necessary diversity of toilets, the choice fell on the urinal, an exclusively male device, as if it were the synecdoche of the toilet and by extension, of the bathroom. This presupposition betrays the masculine predominance that governs the production of spaces, and toilets. Secondly, a photograph was circulated to announce the symposium, and what did it show? Two young women, students from the Interior Architecture Department, dressed in a swimming costume, facing the lens. As a preamble, I asked myself how and why these two students posed in this outfit in front of a photographer’s lens. And then I wondered about what this political and aesthetic choice was meant to state. Finally, I tried to understand what relationship this cliché had with the issue of intimacy and toilets ? Might it be the feminine counterpart to the previous image, showing two rows of five urinals? How might we analyse this scopophilic scene? A scene in which two young female students, backs to the wall, as in mugshots taken by the police, are reified. They look like objects of contemplation in a scene that highlights the contemporaneity of the thesis outlined in the seminal analysis developed almost fifty years ago by Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jimenez . Aren’t we again facing the concept of the “paradox of phallocentrism”, sometimes subconscious, made famous by Mulvey in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”?