OutHere

Room is a privilege. Particularly in these days on the pandemic when a room with walls and windows, denotes a shelter from contagion, whereas homelessness poignantly reminds us of the inability to shelter from the virus. A room both separates and protects us from what is outside. While at the same time it is nothing, but a site taken out of space, made of boundary lines which define what is in and what is out. However, the terms inside and outside are not conclusive in this context. Every outside is an inside from another point of view, hence the inconclusiveness of site and space. If we draw outlines of a room on the ground and step inside the lines,

Are we still in the same space? Or are we in a new inside?

In OutHere, the spectator finds themselves facing a two-dimensional room/space outlined on the floor with duct tape. A doorway both invites them in while alerting them to the lines on the floor. Basic furniture like a bed, pillow, and blanket is outlined also with duct tape. This way the concept of the room is laid out in one dimension, but not inhabitable. In this two-dimensional floor plan, the spectator will encounter a “real”, three-dimensional chair and table, on which sits, a cassette player. This installation is placed in front of a window, outside which sees the spectator, a mirrored lay out made of white ropes in the field among the trees. Instead of a carved table and chair, there awaits two tree stems in “silence”. One room is “Inside” and the other is “Outside”. One offers you to listen and interact, but the other is only to reflect on where you are and what surrounds you, while bolding the concept of the two-dimensional room.  

Tape plays the voice of the artist describing the moment of entering the room, while moving in between the lines and limits of language. With her voice, the artist guides the participant on a poetic journey. She begins with “I am the space where I am” and finishes with “I became the space”. Instructions placed next to the cassette player, instruct the audience as participants to play and listen to her voice, pause to listen to what surrounds them and reflect, and then record their own voice narrating those reflections, to leave behind a piece that remains part of the room.

In this way the work raises the question of: “how room sounds like”