Cabins to think about

Cabins to think about is a journey through the spaces where philosophers and creators of the 19th and 20th centuries retired to work, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life in the urban environment.

Through Eduardo Outeiro's photographs of the huts in their original locations, the corresponding architectural plans, models and other documentation such as a selection of herbariums from each of the places where they are located, the project investigates the relationship between consciously chosen intimacy and the creative process.

This highlights the importance of the organisation of the space of thought in the act of creation, in the case of the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, the composers Edvard Grieg and Gustav Mahler, the playwright August Strindberg, the writers Knut Hamsun, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf, the poet Dylan Thomas, the filmmaker Derek Jarman, and, finally, the explorer and writer Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

The exhibition, which has been expanded with new pieces at the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia (FCAYC), is a project by Eduardo Outeiro, curated by Alfredo Olmedo and Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, with the collaboration of the Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña). In Cerezales del Condado it takes on relevance from the moment FCAYC begins to consider the search for its own thinking hut, currently under construction, and due to the conjugation of elements that fit in with its lines of work related to the environment (Herbarium).

At Cabins to think about we approach the places chosen by eleven fundamental creators of Modernity, which are reduced (in appearance only) to a minimal architectural expression, immersed in most cases in nature, sometimes exuberant, sometimes wild and minimalist.

A return to a certain conscious primitivism can thus be observed, which constitutes an example of the purifying will of the creative act with respect to what was already beginning to take shape as a fundamentally urban lifestyle from which it was very difficult to escape; undoubtedly a wake-up call with respect to the informative and sociologically (self-)conscious and self-referential maelstrom that we suffer from today.

This conscious choice, already present in a very clear way in the founding experience of the American Henry David Thoreau and his Walden hut, configures one of the most radical examples of this return to spiritual hermitage: the polarity between the ‘return to the origin’ and the ‘vital rebirth’ in which a life dedicated exclusively to the essential things of existence is oriented. A desire to live, in Thoreau's own words, “in the deepest way, extracting from life all the juice possible”.