My Portable Home is part of curator Lars Vilhelmsen’s The Travellers Box project. I used a tent, rogue internet signal, laptop, cell phone, and audio-visual equipment to make the piece. The tent formed a symbolic shelter within the city. It represented a way to strip back from the comforts of a home and focus on the activity of communication, an act that can make one feel ‘at home’ regardless of surroundings. The final outcome, in the form of a video, documents a conversation between my mother and I; me based in a city in England, my mother in the country in Canada, referencing two opposing spaces that are networked through the internet and satellite cellular activity. Furthermore, the work points to the current ability for cultural groups to sustain contact with loved ones, a ‘sense of home’ while apart; a situation aided by increased public access to low cost web-based visual and text-based communication systems.
2008
The Sandwich Box, ICA Overgaden, Copenhagen, June
The Sandwich Box, WOOLOO New Life Berlin, June