Model Mobile Homestead
2018

The community art piece ‘Mobile Homestead’ by Mike Kelley was the point of departure of the workshop by the Beaux-Arts de Paris students, headed by artist Julien Sirjacq, in October 2018. As a community oriented public space and architecture, the project was to deeply consider the idea of the contemporary vernacular. As such, the project was built around a theme of two poles: Unbuilding/Building, and what happens within that transition.

Unbuilding : As the removal of built structures has become a significant industry in the city of Detroit, the global economic interest of contractors makes local concerns such as the architecture and quality of private space a minor consideration, so the intention was to work on the meaning of “erasure” in order to consider the future of the city.

Building : The process of inventing new urban models for the city questions the notion of an imaginary architecture, which is central in Mike Kelley’s work.  

Within the two poles (Unbuilding/Building) lies the transitional space and time. These are pivotal moments like the transition of the seasons, such as the spring and autumn equinoxes that are still celebrated in Detroit through modern rituals (The Marche du Nain Rouge, Halloween, Devil’s Night).

With Detroit going through it’s own transition of renewal, I felt the need to become involved and invested in the positive change. In order to do so I decided to think of the Mobile Homestead as a representing agent for the city of Detroit. I planned to transform this idea into an object (a model of the Mobile Homestead) to use as an instrument of change in a ritual purification. I wished to do so by crystallizing the model with salt as a symbolic cleaning of the spirits. Through the pass-time activity of model house making I intended to perform my own ritual within the domestic space and create a modern ex-voto of sorts.

Process

In a largely disinvested city with many abandoned houses and dilapidated buildings, Mobile Homestead enacts a reversal of the ‘white flight’ that took place in Detroit following the inner city race riots of the 1960s. It does so at a time when the city is exploring new options of renewal by assessing its singular post-industrial conditions in an attempt to articulate a new model for American cities. The sculpture which almost exactly replicates the vernacular architecture of working class neighborhoods in the American Midwest, brings the suburbs back into the city […]

By animating and anthropomorphising the Mobile Homestead in this way, the MOCAD rhetoric implicitly posits that this art object operates as a citizen, to the extent that it has the wherewithal and agency to cultivate particular types of interaction and participation between artists and museum visitors. These interactions, claims the MOCAD website, are emblematic of a citizenship of "urban renewal" that promises to make Detroit a "new model for American cities" (MOCAD 2014).

The Mobile Homestead model was constructed with popsicle sticks and a glue gun, in the archetypical style of pass-time model house making. It was built in the house we had rented for our stay, in the formerly jewish middle-class neighborhood of Russell Woods. The domestic environment in which I constructed the model was, for me, important as well as comforting. The model making was my anchor in the daily life in Detroit, the same way as doing household chores.

The neighborhood of Russell Woods was built during the 1920’s and through the 1930’s with mostly two and a half story single family homes. It was known as a middle-class neighborhood of white and Jewish residents until the late 1950s after which it suffered from the consequences of the ‘white flight’ of the late 1960’s. Because of the history of the house I felt it had a strong connection to the Mobile Homestead. I felt like being in Kelley’s childhood home whilst constructing the model, as if simultaneously in one place and in another. It became especially pertinent when I performed the ritual of placing the model in the salt solution, in the basement of the house; for Kelley had designated the use of the basement of the Mobile Homestead for ‘private rites of an aesthetic nature’

The model was placed in a salt solution for 48 hours. The usage of salt holds an important place in many religions and religious practices around the world. I am japanese on my mother’s side and I remember salt being used in a very specific way in my grandparents house in Japan. Salt purifies places and people in Shinto ritual practices and can be placed as piles on dishes in buildings in a feng shui order. This memory is especially vivid from my grandmother’s passing away when the balance between the spirits, in and around the house, was delicate. Thus the superstitious use of salt became the key element in the ritual purification I wished to perform.