Monica Bonvicini

Double Trouble, 2019, is a sculpture by Monica Bonvicini in which the concepts of intimacy and domesticity are put under question. By presenting a metal bunk bed without the comfort of the mattresses, the artist dissociates the object from its function, which is allowing the person to find restful sleep in it, or a sense of security, pushing away the connection of a bunk bed with a children's room, or a student’s residency. In these times of urgent migrant crisis and massive displacements, the artist links this kind of furniture to refugee camps and temporary shelters, places of transit where there is no chance of finding intimacy or domestic life. By adding three mirrors on the main surfaces of the object and a leather belt hanging from the middle of the structure, the perspective of the eye gets lost in an endless void, in which the sense of emptiness, the negation of identity and privacy, and the impossibility of domesticity are amplified. Only the leather belt - a material and an object often used by Bonvicini to address cultural symbols of dominance, restraint, austerity and discipline, all virtues that have effectively structured and controlled the society since the early modern, empowering privileged ones and debasing the others- is constantly visible, repeated endlessly though the effect created by the overlapping of the mirrors, as to indicate the psychological and physical violence to which immigrants are constantly subjected.

In Double Trouble Bonvicini employs mirrors as hyperbolic metonymy for the society of control, rendering it as a rigid yet void structure, as she did in other works such as Deflated, 2009, or Black You, 2010 The mirror also functions as a reference to identity politics as a psychological means of governance. With the choice of a simple furniture piece such as a metal bunk bed, she addresses how design objects may become signifiers of unequal and unjust distribution of wealth and social positions, or structural and gender-based discrimination as in her works Bonded Eternmale, 2002, or Belts Couch, 2014.