Omar Sosa: Capturing how people inhabit space

Art director Omar Sosa, gave the keynote address at the Situation symposium in Melbourne, 2014. As co-curator of Apartamento Sosa has built a following for the magazine that represents the real inhabitation of spaces in all its human imperfection. Hayley Curnow was intrigued.

Barcelona-based art director Omar Sosa, co-curator of Apartamento magazine, was keynote speaker at Situation, the 7th International Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association symposium. Held in Melbourne from 31 July to 3 August, the event was hosted and arranged by the RMIT Interior Design program – it also included an exhibition and a series of city occupations exploring the spatial and temporal nature of interior design practice.

Omar Sosa, co-curator of Apartamento magazine.

Omar Sosa, co-curator of Apartamento magazine.

The symposium comprised presentations of thirty-one papers and seventeen creative works by international contributors spanning multiple disciplines. With a casual yet impassioned approach, Sosa’s thoughtful keynote address summarized Apartamento issue by issue, focussing on the progression of the magazine and the intent that consistently underpins it.

Working as an art director, graphic designer and publisher, Sosa founded Apartamento with Nacho Alegre in 2008. Described as “an everyday life interiors magazine,” the publication depicts personalized interior spaces, drawing attention to the reality of living habits within space. Reflecting on his own life experiences and the interiors of his childhood, Sosa recalled:

My parents split up when I was quite young so I grew up in two different houses. However, my dad’s has been the most significant one. He has a nice collection of old, restored furniture and is obsessed with renovations, so for a while we were living in a house of constant change. My grandma’s house has been also very influential for me – she’s the only one in the family that shares a direct, real sensibility for art and she herself is a very talented artist. Her apartment is completely cluttered with paintings, little sculptures and books, all in perfect harmony and order.

Sosa’s fascination with the authentic qualities and temporal dimensions of these interiors provided a foundation for Apartamento – albeit perhaps, subconsciously.

This interest was further amplified by the frustration Sosa experienced with the apartment market in Barcelona. Visiting prospective properties, Sosa found such apartments to be sterile in their physicality, but more acutely in their visual representation in books and magazines. Disillusioned by the dominance of interior photography devoid of humanizing traits such as dishes, books, records, pets and so on, Sosa began chiming Einstein’s adage, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” Interrogating the frequent omission of “real life” within depicted interiors, Sosa explains:

The reason we created Apartamento was because we couldn’t find any magazine that fulfilled our taste for interiors. There was surely a bunch of publications we looked at at the time that deserved our attention and from which we got inspiration, such as the sadly disappeared Nest and Casa Vogue, but most of the inputs came out from seeing how friends were living abroad, some photographers work and old and contemporary furniture catalogues.

Fuelled by these influences and with a shared interest in homes, living spaces and people, Sosa and Alegre set out to represent the reality of living in the interior domain. Apartamento intended to capture how people inhabit space, illustrating the varied relationships that people form with intimate, domestic settings. The potential disarray of furnishings, objects and occupants to accommodate the reality of living was a key component of this intent. The photography was to depict non-conventional ideals of the apartment aesthetic, representing the individual behind each domestic scene, as Sosa claims, “interior design is personal expression.”

The first edition of Apartamento was published in 2008, and 5,000 copies were printed – a number Sosa says was at the time “frightening.” While Sosa questioned what he had done, he recalls the delight in finding that all copies sold. Apartamento successfully produced an alternative perspective on how domestic interiors could be portrayed – a perspective that was refreshing, honest and instantly well received. Offering glimpses of how people organize their daily environments, the publication drew attention to personal identity and lifestyle as the true “curators” of space.

Sosa says Apartamento was “mature” by the fourth issue, selling 15,000 copies. The issue featured the Melbourne home of Misha Hollenbach and Shauna Toohey of fashion label P.A.M. (Perks and Mini); the intimate, East-village apartment of indie-actress Chloë Sevigny (including chintz-covered guest room an admirable boot collection) and the lavish interiors of Yves Saint Laurent. Sosa admits this issue is his favourite, yet in the same breath, shrugs and says, “but then, we wanted to do something different.”

A “life travel” feature in issue five comprised breathtaking photographs of mountain ranges in Japan, marking the beginning of sporadic “supplements” in further issues. These features have extended to colouring and activity pages for kids, simple food features and fiction. A comic series illustrated by Andy Rementer and Margherita Urbani (New York) has become an ongoing inclusion. Humorously depicting the misfortune of an unlucky-in-love mouse, titles have included “She’s Taking Everything” and “A Fresh Start” – a highlight of the publication for many.

By issue ten, 36,000 copies of Apartamento went to press, distributed in forty-five countries. The magazine is currently in its thirteenth issue, and Sosa asserts, “We want people to collect it,” maintaining the importance of producing a physical “thing.” Thoughtful consideration of the magazine’s decorative spine, the weight of the paper and the subtly hatched texture of the cover indicate this magazine is a collector’s item indeed. Apartamento itself, therefore, is intended to have a presence in the home of each reader, contributing to the real life of their own personal spaces.

Speculating on the future of Apartamento, Sosa admits, “I guess it’s hard for me to tell since I hope Apartamento will still be the reflection of our curiosities and obsessions and these will surely change a lot within the years.” Keeping readers on their toes, one can only anticipate what is to come in subsequent issues.

Encapsulating his ethos for Apartamento and addressing the notions of the Situation event more broadly, Sosa candidly concluded:

For too many people, being happy at home is pretty much an abstract idea, something they can’t know or imagine, until it appears on some tastemaker’s must-have list, or in a magazine, or reposted on Tumblr. A ‘home sweet home’ is not curated or produced by acquiring a perfect arrangement of chairs, lamps and friends. A real living space is made from living, not decorating. A bored materialist can’t understand that a house has to become a home. It happens not through perfection but by participation.

situation14.com

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