HOME Mariana Ferreira

Home is an installation/performance that proposes the inhabitation of a hybrid digital and organic space to answer the question 'what is a home?'

ABOUT

The founding interest of this creation is the concept of home and how it constantly alters, transforms, expands or compresses, in particular after a process of change. I wonder about how a home is built and what a home actually is. What is the connection between the words home and house? And what are the differences? How far can we stretch a concept like this? Home, space, community, family, identity, work, culture, projection are just a few possible extensions or mutations. Home is desire, it is projection, it exists in the mental space of the imagination, it concerns the future. When someone builds a new home, of any kind, what do they leave behind? What do they take with them? What does it matter?

I am 33, I have moved 13 times, been homeless for 2 years, lived four summers in Iceland. My relationship with the word changes constantly because I change, because life re-signifies the word. So I decided to try to record different ways of relating to the word home, through encounters with people, some close to me, some unknown, and record them on video. Each conversation/encounter begins in the same way: "show me the houses, the places that you consider to have been your home". In particular, I ask people to show me their places from the past, places that they no longer inhabit. I am interested in starting from the past - from memory, from the biographical account - in the construction of an idea of the future.

To make this journey, we use Google Street View and Google Earth. The encounter is recorded by the webcam that films our faces. The computer desktop is recorded as well. Each encounter is unique, takes place without formulas or scripts, and produces its own material that is intimately connected to the person who generated it. In each encounter, I fix small details generated in the conversation. They are of various natures - artistic, aesthetic, historical, cultural, social, political, biographical, ecological, relating to questions of identity or human rights, among others. This material is then researched on the internet, selected and integrated during the editing of the videos. Some of the videos thus present a kind of desktop choreography, an in-and-out, minimize-maximize of searches, windows, files, links and images that spring from the discourse of that particular person.

Throughout the process, which included several meetings and artistic residencies, I was discovering and sculpting a connection between change of home and the relationship with plants. I am interested in the way we bring plants into the house, how we pot them, how we transfer them, create conditions - apparently essential - for their survival. Why do we need them so much? Do they need us? How do plants adapt to survive? What mutations, what genetic adaptations? During lockdowns the purchase of plants went up 500%. I wonder why we do it. What is this need to put plants next to us, potted plants, decorative plants, exotic plants, indoor plants, medicinal plants. What categories are these? Where do they come from? Botanical gardens, for example, are charming symbols of colonialism and appropriation. They were built to house exotic plants to be studied, to be useful to us in medicine and pharmacy.

Domination over nature is proportional to anthropocentrism.

The co-existence and intersection of the digital and natural worlds is one of the conceptual bases of this project, which recognises the importance of access to both universes as indispensable in the construction of an idea of home and, in general, in the composition of a more just and democratic society.

CONCEPT

Home is a space of plants and earth, living plants, flowers, weeds, trees, but also sick plants, too sick to be sold. During the time of the installation, I will inhabit the space trying to create the ideal conditions for the survival of the plants, at the risk of having to let some die. Among the plants, in the pots, in the earth, the videos of the meetings I had with more than 20 people will be inserted. I will use video projection, but also videos on mobile phones, tablets, monitors and other forms of emission. The audience will have to get close to be able to hear the audios.

There will be a soundscape created by the sound designer Cigarra that will be playing on a loop for the duration of the installation. The lighting of the room will be subdued with some natural light coming in, according to the needs of the plants. The videos will maintain the initial editing proposal, with a kind of choreography of internet searches happening on themselves.

At certain moments, I will practice performative actions, either through the reading of texts, the creation of videos or other proposals that fit with the small piece of this hybrid world.

I am interested in expanding the concept of the creation of home, through the constant manipulation of organic matter brought into space, highlighting its adaptive needs, as well as the decomposition that is natural to it.

VIDEO