Hideout for a Creole Imaginary
2013

The one who is full of imagination; the one who is on the move; the one who crosses lines, bridges gaps, is lost in the crowd; the one who migrates; the one who searches for connection; the one who mis-speaks and mis-hears; the one who dreams of palm trees, apple pie, rum and wine; the one with a restless tongue; the one that is always already elsewhere; the one who transverses and interjects; the one from the other side of the tracks; the one who creates a new home, here and there.

The poet W. H. Auden found a home here, in the countryside of Lower Austria, where he lived with his partner for many years, spending summers, and writing in the attic room. It is an unlikely home; a house full of ideas, imagination – it is a hideout.

The work is constructed as a “house-form” located on the lawn of the Auden House. It performs as a contemporary echo to Auden’s own; it is a home in the making, of transience and mobility. It is a left- over, a makeshift architecture, a ruin and a monument; forgotten and remembered. The house is marked by a relentless scribbling – black scratches that cover its surfaces, and that hover between drawing and writing, a textual drive. In addition, four loudspeakers are integrated into the structure and amplify an audio play: a whispering voice that travels between inner and outer; it is a voice crossing borders, to form a language of otherness.

The work is an architectural diagram outlining a space for the creole imagination: the hybridity of tongues, poetics of relation, the migration of ideas. It might be where we can live in the future, or where we may store the voices of a crowd soon to come. An echo-world, here to there.

Exhibited as part of “Silence Turned Into Objects”, at the W. H. Auden House, Kirchstetten, Austria. August 2013 – April 2014