The Room: Intimate Microcosms and World Formation

The chapter pursues a revised dialectics of inside and outside whereby the ‘home’, in its broadest sense, and, within it, the individual room, function as the lens through which one observes and experiences the world, existing both within a broader framework and as the centre of one’s being. The chapter also queries how the experience of living within institutional contexts of self-proclaimed hospitality transforms the perception of intimate spaces, as well as their function and locationality within a social milieu, due to their recalibrating and re/decentring. The case studies are Rachel De-lahay’s Routes (2013), Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things (2015) and Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s The Clinic (2022).