Another slide-collage installation evolved at deWillem3 in Vlissingen in 2004. While there for a residency, I discovered the summer vacation beach cabins in storage just north of the city. During the off season, these cabins would be parked inland from the beach, on an asphalt parking lot protected from the foul winter weather by the dykes. During the summer season, they would be transported to the beach, and lined up in a row just at the foot of the dykes and dunes along the sea coast. This was a very Dutch solution, very practical, very charming in its own way. Reflecting on this yearly migration and the extremes people go to, to compensate their everyday routines, I felt compelled to confront the beach-goers, vacationers and exhibition visitors with the complexities we are all trapped in, on the one hand wanting to escape and ignore, one way or another, yet still following our longings for some kind of way out. LISP imagines taking a vacation in a world driven by disaster capitalism.

 

Building on this theme, I constructed three life-size beach cabins from wood lathing covered with translucent plastic films. They were tucked gently into the exhibition space, rotated slightly within the symmetry of the walls. As with Hakenovsky’s Little Nap, this time 14 slide-collages were projected outwards from inside the three cabins, revealing their images twice; first on the plastic film surfaces, seen as the reversed mirror image, and then opposite, on the walls of the space, in the “correct” orientation. Again, the observer had no choice but to pass through these projected beams, become a part of the images, disrupting them, casting a shadow; an unintended complicity inside parallel worlds. Thus came Life is so perfect into being.