Living Spaces
Video artwork
To inhabit space as though passing through it, neither guest nor owner, a body in transit.
This work began with a series of moves, each one less intentional than the last. The walls of each space absorbed something - grief, isolation, a pandemic, the quiet terror of waking up alone and not recognising the life you’ve built. The rooms felt wrong, as if the architecture itself rejected you. You left, again, and found yourself more detached than before.
An economy built on extraction turned even your solitude into a transaction.
One thousand pounds a month to feel estranged in your own home.
You move again, back to a house that should feel like security but instead stings with failure. The weight of an impossible city, the gravity of debt, the shame of retreat. To fall back into safety is to admit you couldn’t make it.
There is something spectral about living where you do not belong.
The Empire of Light. A Desert of the Real. The family swallowed whole by the architecture of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980). Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) shuttling between the two houses, unable to locate himself in either. South Korea builds a viewing tower at the northern boarder, so North Korea constructs a fake village with painted façades, actor residents, an illusion of life curated for the lens.
Space becomes spectacle the moment it is framed. The empty structures that outlast us, waiting to be re-inhabited, repurposed, overwritten. A house is a repository for all its former lives. Sometimes you are only one more layer in its archaeology.
An attempt to document what it means to inhabit the in-between - to live with the knowledge that nothing is secure, that every space is provisional, that architecture itself is an apparatus of power and exclusion. This is not a haunted house, but something worse: a house that refuses to haunt, spaces that erases its histories, that persists as pure infrastructure, indifferent to those who pass through it.