villa, how to use
by Leonor Antunes

The first monograph to be published on the work of Leonor Antunes, villa, how to use is released in association with the exhibition Antunes conceived for the Serralves Villa in 2011. The result of a close collaboration between the artist and graphic designer Conny Purtill, this fully-illustrated publication includes installation views of Antunes’ exhibition (which featured works produced by the artist over the past decade alongside pieces specifically created for the Villa spaces), as well as five essays that offer an in-depth survey on Antunes’ art.

Dieter Roelstraete highlights the speculative concerns that, under the blanket term architecture, Antunes shares with the three most important German-speaking philosophers of the twentieth century (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Adorno): identity and belonging, homeliness and uprootedness, measures and proportion, space and balance. Taking the case study of Manhattan’s Park Avenue after WWII, Maria Berman examines the theme of duplication in architecture. Doris van Drathen finds in Leonor Antunes’ work the use of “measurement” as a tool of grasping the world. Nuria Enguita Mayo addresses the problems of duplication, faktura and restriction, while Ricardo Nicolau reflects on the dialogue of the artist with the architecture of the Serralves Villa and the memory of other buildings from the history of modernism.