A multi-layered reading on the salon-vitrin coupling: Domestic staging in modern apartment in Turkey

Abstract

This paper focuses on the modern living room, which is appropriated as a salon by the socio-economic middle class in Turkey, and where vitrin is a furniture set in which spectacular objects are staged. Revealing hybridity in the ways the imposed westernization is appropriated and expressed by the inhabitants, the salon becomes a contested space for the multi-generational dwellers in their role of power. Instead of accommodating the everyday practices of the family, the salon is reserved for guests only, like a “museum”. Its contextual extension, vitrin, as an interface nested within its interior wall with multiple layers, offers staged communications between the household and the outside world. This study offers a multi-layered reading to trace the hybridity of expressions created by the inhabitants through this salon-vitrin coupling. It elaborates on domestic staging practices by focusing on the relationship between subjects of dwellers and guests, their representations constructed with the agency of objects, and their immersed environments of windows, screens, and stages. As different generations live in the same house, a specific form of dwelling has emerged. The sociocultural, material, and technological layers of staging practices form a suitable physical environment for the emergence and sustenance of the domestic staging practice. This study concludes that these practices contribute to capturing the transformation of everyday domestic life, in which vitrin has evolved as an inter-facade that produces new meanings from the interior to the exterior, exceeding its original intentions.