Paula Marso - Literary researcher and translator
In dialogue with works by painter and artist Archibald Apori
The small rustic cabin in Rousseau’s work is not the symbol of a new beginning; it is rather criticism of this fable, a rhetorical tool in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences to attack the evolution of architecture and institutional progress. As long as men “are content with their rustic cabins”, they live “free, healthy, good and happy as much as they can be by nature". The instant they discover they can accumulate possessions or riches, slavery, and misery see the light of day.” The gentle landscape of agriculture is now “marred by the sister of unhappy work” and the “walls of cities are only made from the debris of the house in the fields” However, the state of nature is now threatened on two flanks: on one side savagery and on the other the progress of civilization. The era of cabins marks a cesura. The desire for stability is translated by self-sufficiency, a state of equilibrium where everything is subject to an idealized utilitarian economy. The cabin designates the perfect use and the protective distance with its environment, the possibility of perfect isolation, in a distance that is both nurturing and threatening. The “small cabin” is not only the symbol of simplicity and the possibility of a new start outside of society, it is also the pictorial and iconographic representation par excellence of detachment from it.