In a family living under punk shui, condoms are stored in the living room fruit bowl, passports can be found in the freezer. If a CD-cover points to an Ipanapa children’s record, the contents are bound to require a parental advisory sticker. A sports sock hangs from the Christmas tree and the fruit flies have a year-round permission to fly.
SPOTLESS ORIGINS
For decades my home has been decorated in a style that got its name from a man called Josh Amatore Hughes in 2006. Punk Shui. Where Hughes used a chainsaw to mould his interiors, I represent a more natural branch of the movement.
I lived my youth in a home that resembled the centerfold of an interior design magazine. My father and step-mother had an interest in design, functionalism and stainlessness. These passionate aesthetes and missionaries of orderliness had a home where the morning’s paper was recycled before sunset, where window sills could’ve been plates for sushi and where all the threads in a wool carpet were combed in the same direction.
Finland’s ”national architect” Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) had shown my family which path to follow – and why not. Us kids soon understood the relevance of empty space and, abashed, turned our gaze away when we saw a decorative object on the window sill. We were familiar with three colours: red, black and white.
THE FIRST TIME
The first time I spent the night at my boyfriend’s was the first time I encountered punk shui. I was seventeen and the night was stopped short for unromantic reasons – I suffered an asthma attack. The home had not been cleaned for six years.
The mother of my boyfriend was an alcoholic. And the main interior design solutions were based on the needs of an alcoholic: across the apartment, in inventive spots, there were holes measured to fit a Gambina bottle. The place was beautiful and functional with empty bottles, opened gouache tubes and past dinners dried on plates defining the aesthetic direction. The original colour of surfaces was distorted by a heavy layer of dust making the home look like a Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painting.
GETTING INFECTED
My second punk shui revelation came when I was visiting a home in Tampere, where the toilet was in the kitchen. The person sitting in the WC could follow the cooking through the bathroom door’s large window. And the people in the kitchen had a chance to follow a miniature human drama. I had never seen such a practical-anarchic use of space.
I started living by punk shui in 1986, when I moved in with my boyfriend. We had a two-room place in the suburbs where the walls were thirsty for paint. We miscalculated the amount of cobalt blue colour, which ran out mid-wall in the living room. The walls were satisfied with little, so we left the pots of paint, brushes and newspapers covering the floor as they were, and headed for an Italian beach with the rest of our renovation savings. When we returned our relationship was blossoming and we only needed one room. The other we used for rubbish.
When kids started popping up, punk shui developed from a hobby to an art. Clothes were gathered in the corners as huge piles, which were ruffled once in a while. The ruffling combined with the air’s oxygen was the equivalent of dry cleaning and took care of most dirt. Winter tires were set up as a new settee every summer – a piece of furniture that lasted until winter forced the tires back on the road.
INFECTING OTHERS
For a long time I thought that punk shui was a hobby that kept our relationship alive. When we got divorced a few years ago, only I continued the hobby. Now I’m nervous whether my new partner will join me in punk shui. He is a man in whose home the morning’s paper was recycled before the sun set, where window sills could’ve been plates for sushi and where all the threads in a wool carpet were combed in the same direction.
Jonna Mannila 