Expanding Spaces
Summer 2020
Merani Schilcher — after hours
Expanding Spaces — Summer 2020
Government-issued lockdowns have become standard procedure during the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly separating what is considered private and public space.
Defining space by dividing it to inside and outside is one of human's ways to recognize his position in environments, because we can only ever be either inside or outside, never neither of them. But there are spaces that actively divide these territories. Spaces of transition, boundaries and connections: in-between spaces. Here things meld together and cease to be distinct. Doors, windows, stairs and walls are at once neither and both.
By using the ever-present confinement of our homes as a challenge, I wanted to open up a space that was previously off-limits to the vast majority of the people in my surroundings: my private space.
"after hours" deals with human properties within machines.
Machines have always automated tasks humans didn’t or couldn’t do, and this one is no different. Through the extension of private space into public space and public space into private space, it has become a visualization of human desire for companionship during these trying times in isolation.
It is an open invitation returning every night as soon as the sun sets for anyone watching who might feel alone and hoping for another person waiting at the end of the rope. But it is still a machine extending this invitation, not a person, and it stays impossible to climb this ladder.
