Home
Installation
video and photography
wallpaper 11×3 meter
2004
Home is a multi-media installation on the relation between migrant identities ,architecture and colonial aesthetics. More than 60 images and 6 small monitors are attached to the wall. The images were either shot by Sara Blokland or found in the municipal archive of Amsterdam and in the private photo albums of three young Amsterdam-born women with a migrant background relation to the dutch colonies. The photographs are taken with a archival distance and depict Dutch urban interior spaces.They are combined with archival photographic material, which shows stages of the development of the Bijlmermeer, a district of Amsterdam build up in the 1960s. The images deriving from the albums illustrate the women as tourists, at moments when they appropriated the clichés of touristic locations and made it temporarily a part of their identities. Basically, Home focuses on the relation between architecture and individual histories. Within this frame, it deconstructs the myths of origin, uniqueness and culture, while, at the same time, exploring and unfolding the ways in which photography is used to construct these myths. In Home, the artist connects photographic strategies to migration, to the culture of ‘the others’, thereby prompting the viewers of Home to consider various possible interpretations of it. One of the monitors displays views of Dutch 17thand 18th century amsterdam interiors with a weakness for the exotic fashion that was part of colonial culture. Just like the girls appropriated the touristic clichés, these houses’ architects tie orientalists’ fantasies to peoples’ homes.