THE HOUSE
OF
DUST
2026-03-29
Léa Gravina
Léa Gravina
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
(1) The House of Dust © Alison Knowles and James Fuentes
(2) Alison Knowles, The House of Dust © California Institute of the Arts
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
(1) Interior view of the window featuring the printed California quatrain © Sébastien Tripod / Bureaumilieux
(2) Exterior view of the completed structure inside the museum © Sébastien Tripod / Bureaumilieux
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
THE HOUSE
OF
DUST
2026-03-29
Léa Gravina
On April 1, 1971, a helicopter flew over the California Institute of the Arts campus in Los Angeles, dropping several metres of computer-generated poetry onto a fiberglass house below. The printout stretched four feet long, produced on the green-striped continuous-feed paper characteristic of the era. Wearing a headset and microphone, Alison Knowles directed the pilot to ensure that her quatrains landed precisely on the structure. The pages fell, scattered, drifted away. Perhaps no definition captures The House of Dust better than this gesture.
(1) The House of Dust © Alison Knowles and James Fuentes
(2) Alison Knowles, The House of Dust © California Institute of the Arts
Indeed, The House of Dust has never ceased changing form because it was never closed. Its combinatory structure, its multiple circulations, and the gestures it has generated have made it an open system, perpetually available for appropriation and reformulation.
The work originated in 1967 through a collaboration between Alison Knowles, a central figure of Fluxus, and composer James Tenney. During an informal programming workshop held in the New York apartment shared by Knowles and Dick Higgins, Tenney translated a poetic matrix devised by Knowles—composed of four lists: materials, locations, sources of light, and inhabitants—into FORTRAN IV and submitted the program to a computer at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.
The machine generated hundreds of quatrains, each describing a possible “becoming-house.” A year later, through a Guggenheim Fellowship secured with the support of John Cage, what might have remained a collection of poems became a physical structure. Built in fiberglass, the house was based on one of the computer-generated quatrains:
A HOUSE OF PLASTIC
IN A METROPOLIS
USING NATURAL LIGHT
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE
The structure—actually two houses, a main dwelling and an annex, both biomorphic in form—was installed in a housing cooperative in Chelsea in 1969. Residents deemed it intrusive and noisy and set it on fire only weeks after its installation. Repaired, it later migrated westward with Knowles to California, where it became a pedagogical space on the CalArts campus between 1970 and 1972.
An earthquake destroyed the larger structure in 1971. The following year, Knowles left her teaching position and returned to New York, leaving the smaller house behind. In 1982, it was relocated to the playground of a private elementary school, College of the Canyons, where it functioned as a play structure. After that, its material trace disappears. What survives is the poem itself, repeatedly reactivated and retranslated—sometimes formally, sometimes informally—from 1967 to the present day.
From its inception, The House of Dust enacted a principle of perpetual translation—not translation understood as the faithful transfer of meaning from one language to another, but rather in the sense evoked by Walter Benjamin’s concept of Fortleben: survival through transformation.¹ The work persists because it remains translatable and therefore inherently open to radical reinterpretation. Each iteration produces a difference, and it is precisely within that gap that something new emerges.
The research programme Art by Translation, directed by Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot, embraced this principle in 2014 by inviting artists to reactivate Knowles’s quatrains within contemporary contexts.² Rather than reconstruction, the project privileged generation. Artist Aurélie Pétrel, who produced two such reactivations in 2017 at Montréal’s Fonderie Darling and at Les Magasins Généraux in Pantin, speaks instead of “transposition”: a gesture capable of destabilising her own research methodologies.
By bringing The House of Dust into dialogue with Peter Eisenman’s Early Houses, Pétrel allowed the work to challenge and transform her practice rather than submitting it to a predetermined interpretive framework.
Perhaps it is precisely this willingness to be traversed by the artwork that defines the appropriate stance toward The House of Dust. Translation here is not a pacified operation; it is a process of unlearning as much as learning. To transform the inevitable loss inherent to every translation into a space of freedom is what The House of Dust has always offered to those who take hold of it.
THE HOUSE OF DUST
From its inception, The House of Dust enacted a principle of perpetual translation—not translation understood as the faithful transfer of meaning from one language to another, but rather in the sense evoked by Walter Benjamin’s concept of Fortleben: survival through transformation.¹ The work persists because it remains translatable and therefore inherently open to radical reinterpretation. Each iteration produces a difference, and it is precisely within that gap that something new emerges.
The research programme Art by Translation, directed by Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot, embraced this principle in 2014 by inviting artists to reactivate Knowles’s quatrains within contemporary contexts.² Rather than reconstruction, the project privileged generation. Artist Aurélie Pétrel, who produced two such reactivations in 2017 at Montréal’s Fonderie Darling and at Les Magasins Généraux in Pantin, speaks instead of “transposition”: a gesture capable of destabilising her own research methodologies.
By bringing The House of Dust into dialogue with Peter Eisenman’s Early Houses, Pétrel allowed the work to challenge and transform her practice rather than submitting it to a predetermined interpretive framework.
Perhaps it is precisely this willingness to be traversed by the artwork that defines the appropriate stance toward The House of Dust. Translation here is not a pacified operation; it is a process of unlearning as much as learning. To transform the inevitable loss inherent to every translation into a space of freedom is what The House of Dust has always offered to those who take hold of it.
From its inception, The House of Dust enacted a principle of perpetual translation—not translation understood as the faithful transfer of meaning from one language to another, but rather in the sense evoked by Walter Benjamin’s concept of Fortleben: survival through transformation.¹ The work persists because it remains translatable and therefore inherently open to radical reinterpretation. Each iteration produces a difference, and it is precisely within that gap that something new emerges.
The research programme Art by Translation, directed by Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot, embraced this principle in 2014 by inviting artists to reactivate Knowles’s quatrains within contemporary contexts.² Rather than reconstruction, the project privileged generation. Artist Aurélie Pétrel, who produced two such reactivations in 2017 at Montréal’s Fonderie Darling and at Les Magasins Généraux in Pantin, speaks instead of “transposition”: a gesture capable of destabilising her own research methodologies.
By bringing The House of Dust into dialogue with Peter Eisenman’s Early Houses, Pétrel allowed the work to challenge and transform her practice rather than submitting it to a predetermined interpretive framework.
Perhaps it is precisely this willingness to be traversed by the artwork that defines the appropriate stance toward The House of Dust. Translation here is not a pacified operation; it is a process of unlearning as much as learning. To transform the inevitable loss inherent to every translation into a space of freedom is what The House of Dust has always offered to those who take hold of it.
(1) The House of Dust © Alison Knowles and James Fuentes
(2) Alison Knowles, The House of Dust © California Institute of the Arts
In the autumn of 2025, architects Sébastien Tripod and Jean-Michaël Taillebois of the collective Bureaumilieux, working in collaboration with artist Mélissa Rouvinet, constructed a new iteration of The House of Dust at the Kunstmuseum Bochum.³
They chose to translate the original fiberglass—a material whose carbon footprint now appears historically outdated—into cob, a mixture of clay and straw. The construction unfolded publicly over the course of two weeks. Dust filled the museum galleries alongside the cheerful sounds of collective labour. Metal was welded. Earth was kneaded and shaped.
Replacing fiberglass with cob constituted a material position. It rejected technological reproduction in favour of manual experimentation, introducing organic chaos and self-construction into the clinical purity of the white cube. It also meant accepting that the structure would crack as it dried, remain unpredictable in its uses, and resist or endure in ways that could not be fully anticipated.
The final form was not the result of a fixed concept but of a collective process that transformed the construction site into a school and the institution into a terrain of experimentation.
This form of mistranslation—translation that embraces deviation rather than fidelity—took concrete shape in Bochum. Bureaumilieux and Mélissa Rouvinet chose cob precisely because they had never worked with it at this scale. The team experimented with different support structures, adjusted clay-and-straw mixtures on site, and invited an external specialist to share technical knowledge that was subsequently circulated among participants.
As Sébastien Tripod explains: “What mattered to us above all was making a process visible. Our approach was fundamentally empirical.”⁴
The invitation extended to visitors to remove their shoes before entering the structure produced an experience of shared vulnerability that was absent from the original poem, yet constituted a remarkably faithful translation of its spirit.
(1) Interior view of the window featuring the printed California quatrain © Sébastien Tripod / Bureaumilieux
(2) Exterior view of the completed structure inside the museum © Sébastien Tripod / Bureaumilieux
What these successive reactivations outline is the possibility of a curatorial methodology grounded not in mastery over the object but in attentiveness to the processes and relationships it generates.
One does not exhibit what one has already understood; one exhibits in order to understand, accepting that the artwork continually escapes comprehension. This shift is as much epistemological as it is practical. To conceive of exhibition-making as an act of translation is to move from preserving forms to sustaining processes. It transforms the curator into a conflicted mediator, a double agent who does not merely display objects but produces situations of thought and experience. The survival of the artwork depends less on the permanence of its materials than on the ability of curators, artists, and audiences to keep alive the network of mediations that surrounds it.
On October 29, 2025, Alison Knowles died in New York. At that very moment, in Bochum, artists and architects were kneading clay and straw with their bare hands inside a museum, rebuilding her house. This coincidence is not a forced symbolic gesture. Rather, it reveals the very logic of The House of Dust: a work that never waited to be preserved in order to survive. The cob dried slowly. It cracked a little. That is normal. It is simply what clay does when it takes shape.
Notes: (1) Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, Vol. I (2) Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot (eds.), The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, New York: James Gallery / Paris: Art by Translation, 2016. (3) How We Met, Kunstmuseum Bochum, November 8, 2025 – February 1, 2026. Curated by Julia Lerch Zajączkowska and Eva Busch. (4) Interview conducted with Sébastien Tripod, Jean-Michaël Taillebois, and Mélissa Rouvinet in Lausanne, November 26, 2025.
What these successive reactivations outline is the possibility of a curatorial methodology grounded not in mastery over the object but in attentiveness to the processes and relationships it generates.
One does not exhibit what one has already understood; one exhibits in order to understand, accepting that the artwork continually escapes comprehension. This shift is as much epistemological as it is practical. To conceive of exhibition-making as an act of translation is to move from preserving forms to sustaining processes. It transforms the curator into a conflicted mediator, a double agent who does not merely display objects but produces situations of thought and experience. The survival of the artwork depends less on the permanence of its materials than on the ability of curators, artists, and audiences to keep alive the network of mediations that surrounds it.
On October 29, 2025, Alison Knowles died in New York. At that very moment, in Bochum, artists and architects were kneading clay and straw with their bare hands inside a museum, rebuilding her house. This coincidence is not a forced symbolic gesture. Rather, it reveals the very logic of The House of Dust: a work that never waited to be preserved in order to survive. The cob dried slowly. It cracked a little. That is normal. It is simply what clay does when it takes shape.
Notes: (1) Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, Vol. I (2) Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot (eds.), The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, New York: James Gallery / Paris: Art by Translation, 2016. (3) How We Met, Kunstmuseum Bochum, November 8, 2025 – February 1, 2026. Curated by Julia Lerch Zajączkowska and Eva Busch. (4) Interview conducted with Sébastien Tripod, Jean-Michaël Taillebois, and Mélissa Rouvinet in Lausanne, November 26, 2025.
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
