Comfort Station is pleased to announce La Casa de Todos / Everyone’s Home an exhibition by Edra Soto that will reimagine the existing installation SCAFFOLD.  The exhibition opened on June 15th, 2024 and will be accompanied by various programs throughout the summer and fall. For more info, please visit: https://comfortstationlogansquare.org/la-casa-de-todos.

Soto’s practice draws from her Puerto Rican roots to instigate conversations about history, diasporic identity, and constructed social orders. La Casa de Todos builds on her ongoing project “Graft,” which integrates architectural intervention and social practice.

With this public installation, Soto invites the community to celebrate a shared home together. La Casa de Todos, or “Everyone’s Home,” reconfigures Via Chicago Architects + Disenadores’ work titled SCAFFOLD, transforming its structure by overlapping abstract carved panels, delineating safe zones destined to house public gatherings and moments for celebration.

The decorative motifs carved to the panels are directly sourced from representations of Puerto Rican rejas (wrought iron screens) commonly found throughout the archipelago. The introduction to a structure painted with a multicolored palette, a new approach to Soto’s work, was sourced from the archipelago’s residential architecture. Her representations of rejas propose and celebrate the cultural value of Puerto Rico’s lower- and middle-class communities. Soto’s works investigate and make visible the relationships between Puerto Rican cultural memory, its African and Black heritage, and the threads of colonial historical lineage of the United States.

Beginning with the opening of La Casa de Todos in June, Comfort Station will be hosting a series of related performances and programming, many of which are co-produced by the Palenque LSNA neighborhood association of Logan Square. Among them are a series of “Drag Me To Life” performances hosted by Cindy Nero throughout the summer; a dinner hosted by Txa Txa Club on July 26; and a closing Dia de Muertos celebration organized by Opera-Matic youth on October 26.

La Casa de Todos is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art, and is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.