Contents: 31 Tiensevest

We were invited by Gallery Transit to make a project for the 1996 opening of their new gallery space.

In 1994 the gallery relocated in a beautiful Art Nouveau inspired town house. The only previous occupants, the owners, had stored throughout the house all their belongings, clothes and furniture. Transit moved all their accumulated possessions, as well as the gallery, into the building. They decided to leave only the salon, the physical core of the house free of domestic objects, painted white as the exhibition space.

Two pairs of lives at either end of the century have been laid over one another, the similarities and differences can be found in the stored chaos of material possessions.

With every room of the house nearly full, the conventional classification of things has collapsed. Paintings are stacked on top of furniture, souvenirs mix with food, clothes merge with packed libraries; whose, when, and where, are difficult questions even for the occupants to answer. Into this extraordinary situation we came to work. What began as a photographic inventory -following the logic of Lost Property - gradually disintegrated. However tempting, it seemed dishonest to introduce a stranger's order - to put words into people's mouths - into the complexity of this material entanglement.

What evolved were 148 images and sound, presented in a form of a slide show viewable from the living room of 31 Tiensevest during the duration of the exhibition.

We produced a limited edition CD rom as a catalogue of the project, it contains all the images and features a soundtrack specially composed by the Bammer Project.

Contents:31 Tiensevest was included as part of Material Culture at the Hayward Gallery, London 1998.

In 2007 we made a new yet related project for Transit entitled ArtLife