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The Apartment Grows When You Leave It
This article documents an ongoing work. Spatial configuration confirmed to shift between documented visits.
*The Apartment Grows When You Leave It* is a durational immersive work occupying a residential flat in Dakar's Plateau neighbourhood. The installation recreates the interior layout of the McRae apartment from Chapter 1 of the novel — the rooftop sanctuary where Katita and Leif shelter after their escape — but transploses it into lived, inhabited Senegalese space.
The work operates under a strict operational rule: each time a visitor exits and re-enters the apartment, the interior configuration has shifted. Walls remain load-bearing, but furniture, doorways, spatial relationships, and sight-lines rearrange between visits. Changes are deliberate but unmapped. A corridor that was 4 metres long may stretch to 7 metres on return; a room previously empty now contains a table; a door that led north now faces east. No structural alteration occurs; only the inhabited arrangement transforms.
Embedded throughout are speakers broadcasting overlapping Wolof-language recitations in the griotic oral tradition. Multiple voices tell Leif and Katita's story simultaneously, each teller contradicting the others on irreconcilable points — one claims they crossed red desert, another insists the journey was underwater, a third describes a city of markets that appeared and vanished. The oral archive grows with each visitor: new testimony is recorded, then re-broadcast the next cycle, creating nested loops of witness.
The collective frames this as an adaptation of the cycle and eternal recurrence / breaking the cycle — the impossibility of entering the same space twice, the Möbius geography of Dakar's compressed urban fabric, and the epistemology of oral tradition, where truth lives in multiplicity, not fixity. No photography permitted; documentation via written testimony only. [1]
See also
References
- ↑ All visitor journals held at Institut Sénégalais d'Études Contemporaines; selected excerpts in *Africana Quarterly*, 2022.