TITLE: HELPERS – CHANGING HOMES

“What makes a place your home? How do you conceptualise this if home is constantly changing? How do you fill the void of a home you have moved away from?”
In average, a person in the United States moves 11.7 times in a life time. Some people move much more frequently and have several homes at a time. Yuka Oyama belongs to this group as someone who herself has multiple simultaneous places of home. From experience, she has discovered that a transitional lifestyle demands stable points and alternative forms of home in order to cope with constantly changing surroundings. What becomes home, and how the notion of home is constructed, is then individual.

In HELPERS – CHANGING HOMES Oyama sought to portray individual views upon how a handful of portable personal objects help people to make a sense of home. After conducting interviews, she created a portrait of each person as a shelter resembling their objects made out of cardboard boxes. In the next step, she sought to commemorate the experiences of her interviewees in a symbolic way. She orchestrated a filmed performance, where they enacted movements of a hermit crab, a creature who regularly swaps its shell–or home—for a new one in order to grow.

GENERAL CREDITS

Yuka Oyama, HELPERS – CHANGING HOMES, Wellington, New Zaland

Funded by: The Dowse Art Museum, TeWhare Hera Internatinal
Production Managers: Spring Rees, Linda Lee
DOP: Waka Attewell
Choreographer: Lucy Margaux Marinkovich
Director: Yuka Oyama
Foto: Alex Efimoff

Produced during the artist in residence, Artist Residency Te Whare Hera provided by the School of Creative Arts at the Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand. This artwork was exhibited at the “Language of Things” at The Dowse Art Museum in 2018. The curator was Sian van Dyk.