Taipei Travel

Semiotics of the Home is part of a series of performance video project that was developed in the summer of 2022 at RAIR, a residency stationed within an industrial waste recycling center in northeastern Philadelphia. Working with the transformative material process at the waste stream, the artist duo employs the dump as a metaphor for the ways in which meaning and value are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in our daily lives. Through the waste stream, structures that once stratified and divided spaces, people, social groups, and activities, are collapsed onto each other by ways of dumping, sorting, and recycling. The value of the objects is reconsidered and re-assigned, similar to principles of categorization that are at once arbitrary and deeply rooted in systems of power in the modern world.

Interested in the paradoxical relationship between industrially built structures and the intimate and domestic spaces they house, the duo imagines construction machines as inhabitants of the home, completing daily tasks such as cooking, cleaning, eating, and resting. The gentle gestures enacted by the large-scale machines subvert our notions of the domestic. Industrial equipment becomes inhabitants of a home rather than the machines that construct the spaces we inhabit daily.