Swiss artists Beat Klein and Hendrikje Khune are probably The Irish Times Property supplement's most avid readers. Well, readers isn't exactly accurate - they don't actually read a single word of it. Instead, as soon as they can get the paper on Thursday, they take it back to their temporary studio at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and get busy with scissors and glue, cutting out the colour pictures of houses and mounting them on tiny bits of card.
In the past 12 weeks they have painstakingly assembled a three-dimensional sculpture made entirely from these teeny Property supplement cut-outs. The oddly recognisable streetscape now takes up a sizeable part of the floor space of their Dublin studio.
The artists arrived in Ireland in September to take up their four-month studio residency at the museum and knew instantly they had found a subject to explore when they came face to face with the national obsession with property. "Everybody seemed to be talking about it," says Beat, who is a sculptor, "and we were amazed when we saw an entire section of a newspaper and colour pictures being used to advertise houses."
In Switzerland, even the most lavish property gets only a couple of lines of basic text in the paper - but that's because it's nearly always in the "For rent" column. "The whole idea of ownership was very interesting for us," says Hendrikje, who is a painter, "because in Switzerland so few people own their own homes." They went on to explain a little about the rent-controlled, long-lease culture they come from, which is so tenant friendly that if there is a drop in interest rates, it has to be passed on by the landlord to the tenant in the form of reduced rent. They are amazed that young people here can even think of buying a house, because in their wealthy country, a down payment of 40 per cent of the purchase price is usually required, making house purchase the province of a small band of thrifty middle-aged people.
Far from being horrified by the unstoppable national urge towards home ownership in Ireland, the pair can see the long-term logic in it. They say that even the Swiss government, which is now faced with a growing number of elderly people needing financial support to pay rent, is starting to think of ways of encouraging people to buy their own homes.
Their two-inch high Lilliputian streetscape is sprawling out in every direction on the floor of their studio as the weeks go on. "It struck us immediately that Dublin is arbitrarily out of control," says Beat, "and this is a response to that." While the piece, called pithily enough, "Property" is not officially on display - its first public airing will be in Basle in the new year - it can be seen through the tall glass doors of their studio in IMMA's grounds. "The response has been wonderful," says Hendrikje, "people, even schoolchildren, walk by, see it and tell us a story about one of the houses. It seems that everyone has a story about property."
The pair have yet to venture inside a single one of the hundreds of houses they've cut out. However, having surveyed three months worth of housing stock, they do have their favourite styles - bungalows for Beat and grand Georgian for Hendrikje.
The pair will be working on the piece for the next two weeks and bemoan the seasonal slimming down of the supplement. "It's not so much three dimensional as four dimensional," says Henrikje, "the fourth being time because the sculpture grows every Thursday."
