House on Wheels
2003
Size: 3x2x1.5m
Material: Wood, found material
Project: უცხოელი / Foreigner
Place: Wine Factory Savane, Tbilisi, Geogia
The house on wheels was a multi-functional house, which could be slept in at night and used as a market stall during the day. The house was mobile and its shelves could open and close. I lived there for the two months of the project, building and adding parts to it every day.
This work was a reaction to the situation in Georgia in 2003. The theme of searching for home continues, only here I am back home, in Georgia, where I find my country has become impoverished almost beyond recognition. Everyone seems to have become a small trader, offering a little of this and a little of that for sale. I have to face the fact that if my life had not gone the way it did, I could easily have ended up this way, and my home would have been a stall in the market. In a sense, this involved destroying my rather romanticized image of home: what looked like a castle from a distance turned out in fact to be ruins – an illusion. This sense of general illusoriness grew stronger as I noticed how fast things were changing in this country and how there was absolutely no feeling of continuity to anything happening here. Everything was on wheels, everything could be folded down and packed away.
After the exhibition was over, I took my work to the marketplace and left it there, watching and filming it gradually being taken to pieces as people removed the parts they needed for improving their own houses on wheels. My house, therefore, lived on, dissolved into the market itself.