This world is not my home, I’m only passing through. Mixed media installation including secondhand furniture, hand-dyed silk, astroturf, fabric scraps, and fluorescent bulbs. 2018. Photography by Gabriella Willenz
This world is not my home, I’m only passing through is a showroom for a living room-cave-bunker that situates itself in an ecosystem of timeframes, where an anthropogenic present is haunted by ghosts of the past and future. It is a cave in which the stalagmites are made of garbage and scavenged fabrics, the walls are covered with silk reproductions of Orientalist Modernist paintings, and silk screens function as windows to an outside world that bears the scars of the fantasy of Progress.
As a repository of the climactic, hydrologic and spiritual conditions outside, as well as a portal into spirit realms and sites of metamorphosis, death and rebirth, I consider the cave to be a valuable ontological laboratory through which one may use fantasy as a speculative tool to imagine a path through climate disaster and the material, cultural and psychospiritual accumulations of colonial histories and extractive economies. It is a space of not just archiving and remembering, but also forging new modes of remembering. What ghosts will we take with us into the new world, after we re-emerge from the cave?