Playhouse/Episodes 1-4

Video installation, 4 Videos, 2 min each, 2012
sound/color

In my work “Playhouse” I occupy little wooden houses that exist in children’s playgrounds in order to perform various actions with them.

These little houses become for me suitable sculptural environments in the public space of the city, where I can develop ideas about immigration, the need for security in the public and privates sphere, the loss of life’s stability, the desire for adaptation and appropriation, the anxiety about alienation and exclusion etc.

The actions-performances that I organized are addressed to the random public that happens to be at the playground that exact moment.

Within a reasonable time frame I move from house to house to perform different plays: a puppet play where the puppet and the subject create an illusion, a perforated house where is insulated with the help of toasted bread,  slide which is used for emptying the contents of my suitcase over and over again, a standing figure that looks like a guard all wrapped up in her sleeping bag, an actual occupation and reshaping of a small wooden house with my stuff in order to spend some time in it, etc. This small wooden house within this particular framework is hypothetical and schematic in relation with reality and is built to offer a fantasy platform for children.

Inside this imaginary domesticated space I find the freedom and I get arbitrarily the right to refer to my own-often cruel- reality with unexpected results regarding both the ambiguity of the images and the reactions of the people.What at first is perceived as the beginning or the participation in some sort of game, gradually acquires an entirely different substance and form, it becomes  a paradox, and it begins to puzzle, to surprise and even to disturb.