La Casa 1-2 (aka The House, The Flat, 2014) at "Age of Experience" (Vienna)

The House, The Flat (aka La Casa 1-2) contemplates the living space as an expression of personality. Footage of a house and a flat from 2001-2013 pieces together the timeless inwardness of two very different living spaces in Spain and Hong Kong.

The House, The Flat contemplates the house as the expression of personality, as well as the ornaments that form its signature. To me, the camera and cinema has a unique role to play in archiving such imprints. Footage of the same house and flat from 2001-2013 pieces together the timeless inwardness of two very different living spaces in Las Palmas, Spain, and Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong, respectively.

On the interior of the bourgeois home, Walter Benjamin comments, “For the private person, living space becomes…antithetical to the place of work.” In shaping his private environment, the private citizen participates in history; s/he “gathers remote places and the past.” The first part of the video essay articulates my urge for intimate connections with just such a space – the house in Las Palmas where my husband grew up. What could an outsider like me understand? What's accessible is the furniture and ornaments, which my camera captures.

The second part depicts my parents’ home in Hong Kong. Although it also shows a domestic interior, as an insider I relate to this space very differently, with a deep-rooted understanding of the logic behind its organization from the start. Focusing for the most part on the small ornamental objects in the flat, I highlighted the everyday creativity of my mother, as expressed by her decorations and arrangements. She has instilled her own personality into the house with the limited resources that she has.

As both my parents-in-law and my own father have passed away in recent years, this video also alludes to death. They have spent their whole life embellishing their homes, but eventually they have departed/will depart one by one, leaving behind an uninhabited living space marked by their personality. But the departed live on, in the form of the material imprints that speak of their own ways of participating in history. The video essay thus shows the process of tracing the traces of those living and once lived.