Bundle

2024

Installation is made of mattresses, blankets, and pillows left behind by LELY residents when they moved out, combined with construction slings and luggage lifting straps.

More about the exhibition

Everyone has the right to have a home. Back in 2022, I personally lost my sense of home when I fled my country because of the war, leaving everything material behind. That was the first time I thought about how many things you can actually take with you. I took 3 cats, a laptop and my passport.

I still sometimes remember some personal items, as if I have them, but they are left in my past life somewhere. Over the past two years, I have been able to temporarily regain my lost sense of home, stone by stone, with each new piece of furniture or plant I find. But now, my refugee experience has been overlaid with the realities of the housing crisis in the Netherlands from the perspective of the social insecurity of artists and cultural workers. A building that was home to many people of culture. A building that was home to many people of culture will become a commercial facility.

Back in 2022, I was watching the crisis in Europe that arose from the wave of Ukrainian refugees. I spent the first month after the full-scale invasion in my hometown in the west, where my mother and I volunteered, taking mattresses to schools, looking for free places for people to stay and sending them there. The image of these endless pillows, blankets and mattresses everywhere (on social media, in the corridors where people were hiding from shelling, in shelters) was etched in my mind. Back then, I had an idea for a large bundle that would envelop a loudspeaker with a shouting alarm. This idea remained somewhere on the pages of my notebook.

And now, in 2024, every day across the street I see abandoned Ikea mattresses, neighbours are actively moving out and leaving or throwing away most of their belongings because they can't take it with them. And now, two years later, this triggering image has been layered with a local but still very personal context. Artists are losing their homes due to gentrification and the construction sites around us are literally squeezing us into a vice-like grip and pushing us into the unknown. What will we be able to take with us to our new home? Where will this home be?

A big, clunky space-filling bundle becomes a symbol of forced displacement, an elephant in the room, a situation that can no longer be ignored.