Dalston House: the building that lets you defy gravity

He has drowned people in a swimming pool, trapped unsuspecting visitors in an elevator shaft, and suspended others in mid-air, floating upside down in an endless hotel corridor. Now Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich is throwing people off a building in Dalston.

Over the past two days, visitors to Ashwin Street, near Dalston Junction in east London, have been stopped in their tracks. There are children hanging from window sills and toddlers clambering on cornices. Parents dangle improbably, stretching out to save their offspring, while a skateboarder seems to be grinding along an architrave – two storeys up.

"A lot of funny things go on in Dalston," says one passer-by. "But I've never seen anything quite like this."

The illusion is created by a photo-realistic replica of a Victorian terraced house, built flat on the ground, with a vast mirrored surface suspended at 45 degrees above it. Complete with a door knocker, plaster mouldings and sash windows, it looks as if a complete house has been tipped over and buried in the ground. It forms a surreal stage set for a kind of domestic aerial ballet, the dramas of family life played out across the facade.

"It's based on the typical kind of houses that were here before the street was bombed in the second world war," says Erlich, whose installation was commissioned by the Barbican. "I always want to use ordinary, everyday architecture, and transform it into a stage for the public to participate in a kind of fiction."

Walking down the street, from where the huge scaffolding structure that holds up the mirror is cleverly hidden, it is easy to be taken in. In fact it's so convincing that a group of builders working over the road rushed over to help someone they thought was hanging out of the window.

"I'm not aiming to put people in situations where they feel uneasy," says Erlich, "but it's about how easily our perceptions can be deceived. I want to force people to reinterpret the situations they find themselves in."

Drawing on the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski, his installations have an unsettling, uncanny air, exploring the psychological subversion of everyday spaces to play on our anxieties. But they're also just a whole lot of fun.

"I want to show people that reality is what we build, it's not something given," he says. "But I also just want people to play!"

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