Sound design for Marysia Lewandowska’s installation in Cosmic House.

how to pass through a door continues Lewandowska’s practice of recovering women’s cultural contributions through the use of voice, previously developed in projects such as the Women’s Audio Archive (2009) and It’s About Time at the 58th Art Biennale in Venice (2019), among others. Starting from the notion of the archive as an open-ended construction of contributions and interpretations, Lewandowska’s artistic research during her residency engaged with the legacy of Maggie Keswick Jencks as it is framed by the multiple histories of The Cosmic House: once a family home, a built manifesto of Post-Modernism and a meeting place for the movement’s main protagonists, and now a museum. The new sound installation, with the title borrowed from one of Maggie’s notebooks containing detailed records related to the design programme of The Cosmic House, is the culmination of the artist’s one-year-long sustained engagement with the Jencks’ archives in London and in Portrack, Scotland.

Lewandowska’s resulting new sound installation presented for the first time will occupy multiple rooms throughout the The Cosmic House. The work activates Maggie’s voice by relying on the archival records, both spoken and written, spanning from her formal lectures on the Chinese Garden to the more intimate letters and notes related to the construction of the house. Through her method of ‘voicing’, Lewandowska proposes an alternative encounter with the space, and by acknowledging Maggie’s role and contributions opens up a polyphony of interpretations and a parallel universe to Charles’ own.