Three dimensional trunks and furniture are lashed with rope and dragged by humans, projected in black-and-white on the walls in multichannel video. An interaction between the real and ethereal, in inverse states to the lived experience of migration. Here the people are tricks of light; the things, tangible. Here no one moves, though they carry on forever, step after step, struggling to take things with them.

These migrants are locked in a Sisyphean task of pulling their belongings through an endless cycle of illustrated cities and forest environments. Viewers share the space with the pile of trunks, representing everything the migrants must bring with them: both the external and — as the viewer contemplates the plight of the migrant — the internal.

This play between the physical and the projected video image also deals in the interaction between states of being. In a world of imaginary borders materialized through an ornate state apparatus, status relates to being, to the accepted reality of one’s presence. As people cross lines, they dematerialize, become “alien.”

Depicted in a hybrid of dimensions, styles, and palettes, the effect is one of discordance, contrast, and dialectic. That tension built out of difference exacerbates the exhaustion wrung out of the permanent task of migration. Such a perspective is not uncommon in previous work, which often confronts the plight of the humans who moves across the world and its borders today.

Video Documentation: https://vimeo.com/344435316