Today, having a mobile home or a mobile office can mean anything from living in a trailer park to living out of a suitcase. Deconstructing dwellings, hoarding waste products, rearranging interiors, Australian artists Sean Cordiero and Claire Healy explore the shifting contemporary notions of mobility, home, and waste in their large-scale sculptural installations. INMYX talked with the artists about their recent work while on an artist residency in Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Bethanien, in which they gave a different kind of mobility to an abandoned mobile home.
One of your most recent works, Flatpack, started with an object
you found: a discarded caravan, or camper. How did you come to "own" your first house on wheels?
Berlin
is a city where there have been many people thinking about how they want to live, where there are many
small alternative communities. Next to Künstlerhaus Bethanien is an enclave of campers where people
have set up house, but they aren’t going anywhere. It made us think more about our ongoing interest
in the difference between temporary and permanent living, and a friend of ours found an ad in the paper
for a camper that someone wanted to sell.
A woman had lived in the camper outside of Berlin for 40 years and had finally moved away. We never got to meet the owner of this little home, but we cut it apart, piece by piece, brought it back to Berlin and showed it stacked in four rectangular piles on pallets.
Why take the caravan apart? And why show it on pallets?
When you pull something apart it’s like a complete analysis of the material. And stacking feels like
a safe way to present it to an audience, because it is almost like silencing it. The object almost becomes
a closed book again.
We live in a world where goods are constantly being transported. People are moving too, so there is a certain concept of compression of material and even data, like in jpegs or PDFs. A compressed file. So there is a parallel in people’s lives. Things get left behind or things get lost. Originally, we were thinking about silencing, about compression as kind of "dark matter". When you compress something, how much of the original is left over? It’s like having the matter minus the space. It’s a very much a sculpture idea in that sense. It’s a sculptural way of dealing with something emotional.
Does your lifestyle as artists, moving from residency to residency,
influence your work or does it reflect a larger social trend?
Our lifestyle does feed into how we think and how we work, which can seem a little easy...but I think
it is something very pertinent...especially for people like us who come from colonies like Australia
or America, people who moved and who keep on moving. It’s not a totally new phenomenon. Every time I
go back to Australia I do feel slightly hypocritical in terms of my practice, because I am boarding
this plane that contributes to the greenhouse effect.
Although conservation and recycling may not be a main focus of what we do, these questions do come through in the work. We also live in such an organized society where detritus is not an issue. You put your garbage in a bin, and it goes somewhere. When you start to look at detritus, you automatically think about refuse. Or even more about consumption...getting caught up in the cycle of consume, consume, consume. And how these objects start to quantify your life.
