a straw thatched roof, which turns out to be Vital’s
private home when he visits.
When you reach the top of the hillock, House to
Watch Three Volcanoes thrusts itself out of the ground
like a towering black-and-white equation of straight
lines and sharp angles. Rising 13m and stretching
23m, the design is confounding. From one angle,
it looks like one of the Jantar Mantar observatories
in Jaipur. From another, there are hints of a modernist
cathedral, something you’d imagine Alvar Aalto to
have dreamt up.
A narrow flight of 39 black steel steps clings to
the side of the meringue-white building. There is no
handrail, which Vital says is intentional. ‘The climb up
should be an act of tension.’ At the top is a small, west-
facing Juliet balcony that looks out towards Kelimutu
volcano, with three rainbow-hued crater lakes believed
by locals to be the final resting place of souls. The
platform is tiny, barely large enough for an adult, who
must then turn around and go back down the exterior
staircase, or pass through a small doorway, and climb
down an equally precipitous flight of rail-less steps.
The interior perspective is equally startling. After
the balcony’s panorama of the green fields, lush tree-
line and distant volcano, the sensation becomes one of
descending into a cocoon, one where Vital has literally
turned inside-out the archetype of the Moni house by
lining the inside of the building’s long trunk and tower
with local bamboo and straw.
There’s not much else to the house, yet one lingers,
if for no other reason than to keep gazing up into
the dun-hued rafters, and to let fingers trail along the
ridges of the bamboo. The experience is unexpectedly
introspective, something Vital says springs from a
Nietzsche quote: ‘Since I grew tired of the chase and
search, I learned to find.’
On every front, Vital is still finding new ways to
intrigue and challenge, even if his audience for these
works, because of their locations, is small. For House
to Watch Three Volcanoes, he regrets the exterior is
so white. ‘Do you know Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting
house?’ he asks, referring to the abandoned house
the American artist sawed in half prior to its demolition.
‘I wanted the village women to come and chew their
betel nuts and spit the juice onto the façade of the »‘It all started in Africa, where I wanted to build
something to watch the sunsets from’
The cocoon-like interior of House
to Watch Three Volcanoes, which is
lined with local bamboo and straw∑ 167
Art