This installation was created during an artist-in-residency in Los Angeles. The costumes with bags, baskets and suitcases comment on collecting and how we much we are attached to belongings. The world is filled with stuff. How much more can we carry around to show off our material properties as status symbols?
This work also refers to forced displacement. The person inside the costume is vulnerable and seeks protection in a construction that covers them with bags and suitcases. Thinking of current urgent issues such as migration, escaping persecution, conflict and repression, I try to imagine the circumstances, I try to imagine how hard it must be for these migrants to choose what to bring from home, what to carry, and what to leave behind and what their attachment might be to the few objects they were able to bring.