If the Renaissance placed magic in the hands of the learned man in his study, spiritual enlightenment in the temple overseen by a cleric, and power in the institution, what forms of knowledge might we find in the house, and in the woman who keeps it?
I come to the house as a migrant. I was born into a Catholic family in Soviet Lithuania as the regime crumbled, and grew up on a collective farm among stories of the manor and land we lost after the war, and rosaries prayed in secret after sunset. My parents’ small flat had no dining table. The main meal was lunch at the workplace canteen, where conversation among comrades was easier to monitor. Later came Cambridge halls with wooden panelling and Old Masters, the cool, pale blue drawing rooms of British country houses, libraries of classics in crumbling Italian palazzos. Some were crowded and intimate, others grand, hollow and silent. I learned the margins and weak points of each power structure. Home stayed elusive, something lost or perhaps never there.
In Bhutan I found a word for what I was looking for. Ma-chhim, a term I take from Dr Karma Ura’s writing, means the main or maternal house. In many Bhutanese communities, land passes from mother to daughter, and a husband may join his wife’s household. The work of scholars of the Himalayan region, including Mona Schrempf and Kelzang T. Tashi, informs my interest in how ritual and domestic authority are distributed. I came to this question from a European Catholic tradition in which the woman who kept the house was often praised for her virtue. The maternal house suggested another way of understanding her position. A daughter might inherit the land itself and, with it, the authority to decide how its resources are used and what passes to the next generation. In this sense, the house becomes an epistemic structure, a living archive through which women carry knowledge and identity across generations.
The Bhutanese Royal Family invited me to research the vernacular architecture of Nobgang in Punakha and to remake a traditional house from the village in wax. Nobgang is an eighteenth-century settlement built around the Tsuglakhang temple and known as a place of strong women. It is the birthplace of the four Queen Mothers of Bhutan, who were raised within its matrilineal traditions. Of particular interest to me were its distinctive kabu dharcham houses. The arrangement of these L-shaped rammed-earth structures gives architectural form to the relations between ritual, storage, caregiving and the seasonal demands of the land. To remake such a house raises a sculptural question. What can an impression of its walls and windows carry of the knowledge through which the house has been sustained?
Hearths, grain stores, family shrines and rooms shared by several generations are places where women preserve seeds, manage food, tend to rituals and cultivate the emotional environment in which children learn who they are. Donna Haraway’s account of situated knowledge is important to me here because it asks us to attend to the position from which someone knows. Sara Ahmed’s writing on orientation brings that question close to home. From whose position does a room take the shape it does? What comes within reach through a gesture repeated every day, and whose work makes that possible?
Preserving the architecture of a Bhutanese house raises a corresponding question about the conditions under which its knowledge can continue. A grain store may survive a change in use. Knowing which seeds to set aside, when to sow them and whom to trust with them depends on people having the land, time and authority to act on what they know. Care is labour as well as wisdom.
Bhutan is changing. Technology, migration and new economic opportunities are altering where and how young people live. Community-based heritage programmes are working to preserve traditional houses. I was interested in what the people growing up in and around those houses might choose to carry forward.
Spending time with people before I make a work is part of my artistic practice. Cooking and sharing a meal, even when we have few words in common, matter as much to me as the time spent making a mould. During the residency I had the privilege of spending time with three young women whose lives gave the idea of home quite different meanings.
Pem Lham, an artist in Thimphu, comes from Lhuentse, Bhutan’s weaving heartland. She lives in a shared flat with friends. She paints, embroiders and sculpts the Molay, the grotesque female clown of a sacred mask dance, traditionally played by a man for laughs. Her work asks who gets to define the Bhutanese woman. What interests me is that Pem poses this question by remaking a figure her audience already knows. The woman who was once the subject of the joke now has an artist working on her likeness, deciding which features to carry across into paint, thread or sculpture. For Pem, the house is an inheritance and also a script to be rewritten.
Cho is a nun at Sangchhen Dorji Lhuendrup Lhakhang Nunnery. Over coffee she told me she had had a wonderful childhood. She was still at school when, at fifteen, she felt called to religious life. The nunnery is now her communal home. Alongside their religious practice, young nuns there train in pottery and ceramics. I had come to Bhutan thinking about what a daughter inherits from her mother. Listening to Cho, I began to think about what a young woman might learn by entering a household of women she has chosen to join.
Tenzin Choden is the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Leki Wangmo, a farmer with whom I stayed near Nobgang while researching the house I had been invited to remake. For the first few days Tenzin barely spoke to me. Leki and I prepared the evening meals with mushrooms picked in the mountains and eggs from a neighbour, while Tenzin tended the cows. One evening after dinner I invited her to walk with me in the mountains. It became our tradition, even when it rained and the muddy paths were slippery and we could barely see ahead. On those walks I learned that Tenzin loves anime and draws manga at night when everyone is asleep. She has little desire to live in town or to travel. She likes the farm and the quiet. “Why should I drive, if I already learnt to fly?”
What stayed with me was how easily I might have mistaken Tenzin’s wish to stay for something already decided by inheritance. It took several walks to hear what that choice meant to her. Pem’s work, Cho’s calling and Tenzin’s drawings each belong to a life that the architecture alone could tell me very little about. If Ma-chhim is a living way of knowing, its future depends in part on whether women can choose what they inherit, adapt it or leave it, and still have a say in what becomes of it.
During the residency I took a mould of a window at Trongsa Dzong. It was a first material study for the larger undertaking in Nobgang. A mould records the surface it touches with extraordinary intimacy. Casting that impression in translucent wax introduces fragility into an architectural form built to endure. Light enters the thickness of the frame. Its contours are familiar, yet the experience of looking at it has changed. It is this possibility of encountering an inherited form anew that draws me to remaking as an artistic practice.
The Bhutanese maternal house offers a way of thinking about knowledge itself. What is learned through intimacy, care and repetition can be difficult to recognise as knowledge, even for those who depend on it. This is the enquiry I carry from the residency into Ma-chhim. How can inherited forms of knowledge — held within domestic spaces, ritual practices and material traditions — be reanimated through contemporary artistic practice, and what might they contribute to our understanding of the future?