What Homes Are Made Of The Architecture of Displacement
Lucija Ivšić
In this room-scale, interactive VR experience, entirely created with LiDAR technology during an extended lockdown due to the pandemic in 2021, 110 million points re-construct the artist’s apartment in Melbourne, Australia, while symbolically highlighting the relationship that exists between migration, place, and identity. In this VR experience, visitors can enter and freely explore the artist’s home, by either physically walking, or teleporting within it. Once the viewer has the headset on, they find themselves seated in what seems to be an ordinary apartment furnished with common furniture, yet entirely deprived of any solid shapes. Soon after, depending on the viewer’s curiosity, although still located in the same apartment, the viewer will notice that they are not alone anymore and that a bridge between realities has been established. That is when the apartment starts to change visually; introducing sounds from the artist’s original Croatian home, filling up the space with memories of her parents and the traditional Sunday feasts they had together. Resonating Karen Barad’s “quantum entanglements” that speak of being in two places at once and how memory can be recreated each time it is invoked, this work explores how we experience and “know” a place through our own and someone else’s memories. Using familiar sounds from her family home in Croatia to mediate her personal memories in present living conditions, the artist examines how the isolation from family and past homes and their memory can affect one’s perception of place and identity. Through sonic and visual disjuncture, and the intentional use of the highly-detailed yet dream-like visual aesthetic of point clouds, the work creates a constant tension between presence and absence, present and past, place and location which ultimately disturbs the materiality of the current moment.
